Posts Tagged ‘wildflowers’
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.
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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
Many and one
How could I not show more of the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I’ve seen in years? I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander, where unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field. Below is a single horsemint blowing in the breeze that had come up by the time I was finishing my pictures. Call it flower tower power.
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“Disparate impact”
One of the most pernicious concepts ever to have grabbed hold of our culture and legal system is the one called “disparate impact.” Here’s how it works. Suppose the legislature passes a law making it illegal for a person to commit a certain act (for example murder, assault, theft, fraud). The law is prima facie neutral, meaning it doesn’t mention anything about the personal characteristics of a would-be violator; the law merely says that any person who violates it can be arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law.
Now suppose that of all the people who do get arrested and prosecuted for breaking that law, people with characteristic X happen to constitute a larger share than people with characteristic X make up of the general population. Believers in “disparate impact” then complain that authorities are going after people with characteristic X, and those believers proceed to call our society X-ist (or systemically X-ist), X-phobic, bigoted, hateful, etc.
The obvious flaw in such claims is that there may be a simple, non-discriminatory reason why people with characteristic X get arrested and prosecuted for breaking a law more than their representation in the population would predict: it’s that people with characteristic X actually break that law more often—sometimes much more often—than their representation in the population would predict. True believers in “disparate impact” conveniently refuse to look at the data, and whenever someone does present the unbiased data they attack that person as an X-ist, an X-phobe, a bigot, a hater, etc.
What’s worse, activists wage campaigns to have the police arrest fewer, and prosecutors prosecute fewer, people with characteristic X who do break the law. In other words, ideologues want more of those criminals turned loose upon society, even if it means more crimes will be committed.
To see the folly of such fact- and consequences-free advocacy, look at the situation where characteristic X is being male. The current United States population is approximately 49.5% male and 50.5% female. For convenience, let’s just say the two sexes are about equally represented in the population. Now suppose the crime in question is murder. According to FBI crime statistics, of the people arrested for murder (or nonnegligent manslaughter) in 2012, 88.7% of them were men and 11.3% were women. According to “disparate impact” ideology, this is an egregious example of anti-male bias because police arrested almost 8 times as many men as women for this crime. But would ideologues insist that police arrest only as many male murderers as female ones? That would be folly, right? But that sort of folly is what “disparate impact” ideology calls for. The reality, of course, is that men commit way more murders than women, so of course we expect the police to arrest way more men than women for committing that crime.
© 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
Chipping away at being on a lark
On May 27th I stopped at the St. David’s Emergency Center in Leander. No, I wasn’t having a medical emergency; I just wanted to photograph the wildflowers on the adjacent property. Barbed wire kept me at a distance so I used my longest lens, the 100–400mm, knowing I’d get an in-focus band across the middle of a picture that cropping at the top and bottom would turn into more of a panorama. The purple flowers are horsemints (Monarda citriodora), the red and yellow ones firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella), and the broad white ones basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus).
At one point a couple of small birds landed on a part of the barbed-wire fence. As I already had the telephoto lens on the camera I figured I’d pretend to be a bird photographer. Advancing slowly, I took what pictures I could, still farther away than I’d have liked.
A look through a Texas bird book made me think the birds were chipping sparrows (Spizella passerina), but after Deborah Zajac saw this post she suggested the birds were likely lark sparrows (Chondestes grammacus). The picture of the lark sparrow in The Birds of Texas does seem a better match. Live and learn.
In the pose below, the sparrow seemed a bit put out by my presence.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
12 Years
Twelve years ago today the first post appeared in Portraits of Wildflowers. The photograph in that post showed a single basket-flower. In contrast, today’s picture includes the densest and most expansive colony of horsemints (Monarda citriodora) I’ve seen in maybe two decades. I photographed it on May 28th in between US 183 and the 183A toll road in Leander. Unfortunately construction is already under way on parts of the field, so 2023 may mark this great colony’s last stand.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
National Prairie Day
The first Saturday in June each year is National Prairie Day. In my part of Texas, Pflugerville proved to be ground zero for lush spreads of prairie wildflowers in the spring of 2023, as you’ve already seen in a bunch of recent posts. Here’s a picture showing basket-flowers (Plectocephalus americanus) abounding on the Blackland Prairie in Pflugerville on May 29th. What a sight!
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park
It wasn’t just Inks Lake State Park that was spectacularly flowerful on March 26th. We found that many places along TX 29 from Liberty Hill in Williamson County all the way to the turnoff for the park also sported wildflower displays better than I’d ever seen on that stretch of highway. Here are two views from TX 29 east of the junction with Park Road 4. The red blanketflowers seem to be Gaillardia amblyodon. The brown-centered yellow flower heads are Coreopsis basalis. The white ones are lazy daisies, Aphanostephus skirrhobasis. The all-yellow flower heads appear to be sleepy daisies, Xanthisma texanum subsp. drummondii.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
More stonecrop
A post two days ago showed you how lush the yellow stonecrop (Sedum nuttallianum) was at Inks Lake State Park, an hour west of home, on May 26th. In fact it was probably the best crop of stonecrop I’ve ever seen anywhere, so here are more pictures of it.
And how could I resist pointing out that the bedrock gneiss is nice to photograph stonecrop on?
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Proponents of the race-as-social-construct conceit are enraged that human beings continue to identify each other’s race accurately.
That’s from Heather MacDonald’s insightful new book When Race Trumps Merit. She does
a good job of documenting rampant double standards, which of course are no standards at all.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
More roadside delights from Inks Lake State Park
Here’s another wildflowerful spot along Park Road 4 in Inks Lake State Park that caught my attention on May 26th, particularly because of the white flowers, which are lazy daisies (Aphanostephus skirrhobasis). The red flower heads are blanketflowers, perhaps Gaillardia amblyodon, which is all red, rather than the more common G. pulchella, whose ray tips are yellow. There are two kinds of yellow flower heads with brown centers: Coreopsis basalis, known as goldenmane tickseed, golden-wave, or just plain coreopsis; and Helenium amarum var. badium, called brown bitterweed. The closer view below shows you what lazy daisies look like.
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“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends and companions, kinsmen and relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name and clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”
That’s known as the Parable of the Arrow, and the speaker of those lines was Siddhartha Gautama, by then known as the Buddha. In his teachings he steered clear of theoretical and metaphysical speculations, preferring to find practical ways of dealing with life’s problems. There’s much to be said for that approach.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
More from Inks Lake State Park
Here’s a spot in Inks Lake State Park on May 26th that caused me to make a U-turn and pull over on Park Road 4. The red flower heads are blanketflowers, perhaps Gaillardia amblyodon, which is all red, rather than the more common G. pulchella, whose ray tips are yellow. The yellow flower heads with brown centers are Coreopsis basalis, known as goldenmane tickseed, golden-wave, or just plain coreopsis. The very low flowers growing adjacent to the road’s pavement are yellow stonecrop, Sedum nuttallianum. The second picture shows the densest part of this stonecrop colony a little farther to the right, where the exposed gneiss bedrock that makes Inks Lake State Park so scenic adds to the three-species display. And I guess I should mention the seemingly ubiquitous prickly pear cactus, Opuntia engelmannii.
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If you ever think about human sacrifice, you probably assume it’s a horrible practice from ancient times based on the superstitious belief that sacrificing people would cause God or the gods to favor the sacrificers. Maybe you think about Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. Or maybe you think about the human sacrifices that the Aztecs carried out in Mexico until the Spaniards conquered them in the 1500s and put an end to the practice.
You’ll probably be dismayed to learn there are groups of people in the world today who still superstitiously carry out human sacrifices. You can read an article about that continuing tradition in the African nation of Uganda. Be aware that the article includes some gruesome details.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 