Posts Tagged ‘winter’
Time to hang up the ice for now
If I’ve regaled you with plenty of ice pictures from the mid-January deep freeze, the truth is that spring is beginning to go into high gear here now, no matter the date on the calendar. I figure it’s time to call it quits on showing ice pictures till next winter, so let me close the series with a few more wintry photographs.
The first two are obviously abstractions, both of which look down at ice on the ground. Whether you conjure up any figures in them is up to you—provided you’re up to it. The last two picture show roadcut cliffs along the Capital of Texas Highway. To give you a sense of scale, let me add that the long icicles in the third photograph were taller than a person.
The final view includes some maidenhair ferns (Adiantum capillus-veneris) and a bit of dry bushy bluestem (Andropogon tenuispatheus) that had thriven in the ditch at the bottom of the cliff.
§
§ § §
§
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” So begins Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet. On the day before Valentine’s Day this year the New York Times published the article “100 Small Acts of Love,” which began like this:
Sometimes love needs a grand gesture: a bouquet of roses or a big night out. But strong relationships also need regular care and attention, so we asked New York Times readers to tell us how they show their affection day-in and day-out, all year long.
We heard from more than 1,300 of you, with stories of hot coffee, stolen kisses, full gas tanks, and daily sacrifices, small and large. Scroll down for 100 of our favorites, which have been edited for length and clarity….
You’re welcome to read all the hundred ways.
And in a similar vein, you may enjoy “High School Sweethearts Rekindle Romance 7 Decades Later — and Can’t Stop Cuddling: ‘We’re Like Teenagers.'”
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Two more ice abstractions
From Bull Creek District Park on January 17th come two more downward looks at shallow water turned to ice. The first might pass for an edge-on view of a slightly curving galaxy (akin to yet different from last week’s suggestion of a cosmos), while the second could be a fanciful take on a human brain and its icy thoughts.
§
§ § §
§
It hasn’t been “Don’t be evil” for a long time now.
After days of getting dragged online over its Gemini model generating wildly inaccurate pictures of racially diverse Nazis and black medieval English kings, Google has announced it will partially address the issue.
Google Gemini Experiences product lead Jack Krawczyk tweeted a few hours ago that: “We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.”Social media platform X has been flooded with countless examples of Gemini producing images with “diversity” dialed up to maximum volume: black Roman emperors, native American rabbis, Albert Einstein as a small Indian woman, Google’s Asian founders “Larry Pang and Sergey Bing,” diverse Mount Rushmore, President “Arabian” Lincoln, the female crew of the Apollo 11 and a Hindu woman tucking into a beef steak to represent a Bitcoiner.
It also refuses to create pictures of Caucasians (which it suggests would be harmful and offensive), churches in San Francisco (due to the sensitivities of the indigenous Ohlone people) or images of Tiananmen Square in 1989 (when the Chinese government brutally crushed pro-Democracy protests). One Google engineer posted in response to the deluge of bad PR that he’s “never been so embarrassed to work for a company.”
That’s the beginning of a February 21st article by Andrew Fenton about the latest viral instance of a company putting delusional ideology ahead of facts and reality. You can read the full article, which includes images of some of the counter-factual things mentioned above. If you’ve always wanted to see what one of Hitler’s black Nazi storm troopers looked like, now’s your chance.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Tiny frozen bubbles
From Bull Creek District Park on January 17th comes this downward view of a zillion tiny bubbles in a patch of shallow ice that formed in the bed of the creek. The full-size photograph contains much more detail than the Internet-size image posted above. To get a sense of the original detail, you can click the thumbnail below to zoom in on one little portion of the picture.
They say that one good turn deserves another, so here’s a more verdant frozen bubble fest from the previous day along Rain Creek, with an added sprinkling of sycamore seeds (Platanus occidentalis):
And here’s the same zoomy routine:
§
§ § §
§
“Plastic Bag Bans Work”
“Plastic Bag Bans Work” is the title of a report issued in January 2024. However, on page 5 we find this:
California banned single-use plastic bags beginning in 2016 but allowed thicker “reusable” plastic bags to be sold for a 10-cent fee. The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record — proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste.
Hmm…
§
UPDATE. A year ago I reported on the Linn-Mar Community School District in Iowa, which threatened to punish students and employees who wouldn’t use students preferred pronouns. The district also kept secret from parents any changes in their children’s “gender identity.” Yesterday, the group Parents Defending Education, which had sued the school district over those policies, put out a statement titled “PDE Settles Lawsuit Against Linn-Mar Community School District.” Here’s what it said:
Parents Defending Education’s lawsuit against Linn-Mar Community School District has ended in a settlement agreement that will end the use of a speech-silencing policy that punished students who “misgender” others.
After PDE prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Linn-Mar agreed to rescind—and promised never to reinstate—the portion of Policy 504.13-R that prohibits an “intentional and/or persistent refusal by staff or students to respect a student’s gender identity.”
PDE’s lawsuit and the resulting settlement means that Linn-Mar Community Schools may no longer use this policy to chill student speech and ignore the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment.
“Parents Defending Education is thrilled that Linn-Mar Community Schools has agreed to respect the First Amendment rights of its students going forward,” said Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neily. “This settlement sends a clear message that student speech may not be compelled by administrators when it comes to gender issues – and a reminder to districts that viewpoint discrimination in public schools is wrong, full stop.”
PDE also challenged the “parental exclusion policy” component of Policy 504.13-R, which stated that parents of students in seventh grade and older did not have the right to know their child’s gender identity at school. In the wake of PDE’s lawsuit, the state of Iowa passed a bill banning districts from knowingly giving “false or misleading information” to parents about their child’s gender identity, which the Eighth Circuit found mooted PDE’s appeal on that issue. However, PDE’s research has identified more than 1000 districts across the country that still maintain such policies.
So, one victory down, many more to go.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Another ice abstraction
From Bull Creek District Park on January 17th comes
this abstract downward view of shallow water turned to ice.
(And on a metaphysical matter, should an ice abstraction
be called an icestraction, or is that too much of a distraction?)
§
§ § §
§
What’s fair?
How many times have you heard politicians and activists demand that the rich pay their “fair” share? If you’re like me, you’ve heard it many times. And perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered what “fair” means in that context. When I’m faced with a question like that, I try to get relevant data. Well, on February 13th Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at University of Michigan–Flint, posted a chart drawn from IRS data. Turns out that “in 2021, the top 1% of taxpayers (1.53M) paid a record-high 45.8% of all federal income taxes vs. a record low of 34.4% paid by the bottom 95% (146M).” As I understand it, those figures don’t include the many tens of millions of Americans who pay no federal income tax at all. According to Statista, in 2022 “40.1 percent of households paid no individual income tax.“
If there’s a tax at all, then I think everybody should be subject to it, even if only at a very low rate like 1%. That way everyone has “skin in the game.” People who pay no taxes now might be less inclined to vote for any proposal that they would have to personally pay something for, and less likely to vote for any politician who pushes proposals that would raise the amount they pay in taxes.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Cosmic ice
From Bull Creek District Park on January 17th comes this portrait of ice
on the ground that could pass for a view of a nebula with a myriad of stars.
§
§ § §
§
Sometimes we go to a branch of the Austin Public Library and browse through the DVDs to take out a few that look interesting to each of us, based on what their covers say. So it was three weeks ago, and after we came home I found that Eve had picked a 1954 fictional Japanese movie directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, “Sansho the Bailiff.”
Just the previous day I’d published a commentary lamenting the fact that a seemingly large number of American schoolchildren these days are given the false impression that slavery was a uniquely American institution, whereas the truth is that slavery has been practiced around the world since ancient times and still exists in disconcertingly many places today.
To my surprise, I found out that “Sansho the Bailiff” deals with slavery in medieval Japan. In the film, a mother and her son and daughter get kidnapped by bandits and sold into slavery, with the two children ending up in a slave camp run by the Sansho in the movie’s title. The Independent Movie Database gives the film a viewer rating of 8.4/10, which is about as high as any I’ve ever seen on that website. After watching the movie, I have to say the rating is warranted. If you have the ability to check it out of your library or watch it through a streaming service, or if you’re willing to buy a DVD of it online, it will be well worth your time (even if some scenes are understandably disturbing).
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Blue, but not from ice
Working under and close to the cliff and overhang in Bull Creek District Park on January 20th didn’t
allow easy glimpses of the sky. In this case, though, I managed to include its blue as a background.
§
§ § §
§
One reason my country is in so much trouble is fiscal irresponsibility. Regardless of which major political party has been in charge over the past decade, federal “spending” has gone up and up and up. I put “spending” in quotation marks because the government keeps “spending” money it doesn’t have. It gets that money in two ways: by borrowing it and by simply printing it. Whereas historically the money supply was backed up by gold, now it’s backed up by nothing. The huge increase in the money supply soon triggered the greatest inflation the country had seen in four decades.
When the current administration took over in January 2021, the annual inflation rate was a healthy 1.4%. (That means that prices in January 2021 were an average of 1.4% higher than they’d been in January 2020.) By February 2021, just one month later, the annual inflation rate had jumped to 2.6%. You probably remember that by June 2022 it reached an extraordinary 9.1%. (You can see the annual inflation rate in every month from 2000 through 2023 at the U.S. Inflation Calculator.)
Through much of 2022 government representatives repeatedly insisted that inflation was “transitory,” despite what everybody could clearly see, despite the high prices people had to pay every time they shopped for groceries or put gas in their cars. Things got so obviously bad that even government officials and sympathizers who are paid to lie had to stop lying.
Finally the Federal Reserve, in an attempt to curb the record-high inflation, began raising interest rates, which had been close to zero ever since the financial crash of 2008. It was those minuscule interest rates that had enabled the government to keep borrowing extravagantly. (As if that wasn’t bad enough, the near-zero interest rates also particularly hurt frugal older Americans who had been dutifully saving for retirement but now could count on essentially zero income from interest on their life savings.)
Interest rates have now risen to around 4–5%, and the federal government’s debt to $34 trillion. (Because the U.S. population is around 336 million, if you’re an American citizen your personal share of the debt is currently a little over $101,000. Are you—plus every other member of your family—ready to pay the $101,000 each one of you owes? Somehow I think not.) Because of the current 4–5% interest rates, it has quickly become much more expensive for the government to pay just the interest on its debt, let alone pay down the huge debt itself.
As Philip Swagel, director of the Congressional Budget Office (typically described as a non-partisan institution), recently testified: “Rising interest costs will crowd out other possible uses of government resources, and then also pose a risk to our economic stability.” According to a CNBC article on February 14 (some Valentine’s present!):
Swagel said high interest rates, an aging population and growth in federal healthcare costs are all contributing to the growing national debt, which is projected to climb to a record 116% of GDP by the end of 2034.
“Under current law, there would be not enough resources to pay the promised benefits of social security,” in 10 years, Swagel said.
The Congress of the United States needs to stop its extravagant spending and live within the country’s means, just as we all have to do individually. The alternative is national ruin.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Sometimes curves, other times bubbles
Along Rain Creek in my Great Hills neighborhood on January 16th, our first deep-freeze day of the winter, I took my share of pictures looking down at the designs that formed when shallow water at the edges of the creek froze. Sometimes it was curves in the ice, other times frozen bubbles, that intrigued me. Either way, seeds from nearby sycamore trees (Platanus occidentalis) sprinkled the surface.
§
§ § §
§
While I was on the Skeptic website to prepare a recent commentary, I came across Craig Frisby’s January 18th article “Educational Testing and the War on Reality and Common Sense.” Here’s how it begins:
The practice of discussing educational testing in the same sentence with the term “war” is not necessarily new or original. What may be new to readers, however, is to characterize current debates involving educational testing as involving a war against: (1) accurate perceptions about the way things really are (reality), and (2) sound judgment in practical matters (common sense).
The article documents the measures the educational establishment has been taking in its war against the way things are and against sound judgment in practical matters. As part of that campaign, educationists have made and keep on making counter-factual claims about testing. Among those untrue claims are that testing harms students, that testing is culturally biased, and (with wearisome predictability) that testing is racist. Based on those false claims, educationists continue lowering standards and doing away with more and more tests to hide the reality of how poorly students are doing.
You’re welcome to read the full article.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Two takes on sycamores
Along Rain Creek in my Great Hills neighborhood I did rather different takes on sycamore trees (Platanus occidentalis). Above, from January 16th, you have sycamore leaves and seeds with thin ice at an edge of the creek. Below, from January 20th, come rippling reflections of a sycamore’s bare trunk and branches.
§
§ § §
§
… Even as I’ve encountered many kindred spirits throughout this new journey of mine, I’ve observed a concerning trend among some who, in their opposition to the suppression of free expression, have adopted tactics they initially opposed, including bullying, righteousness, and aggressive tactics. I’ve also noticed how some of the people who initially championed freedom of speech have gradually shifted their positions, revealing a universal temptation to silence others when afforded a position of power. I’ve come to realize that what they were really fighting against was the tools of censorship and suppression being used against them, not against their use in general.
The temptation to silence others exists across the political and ideological spectrum—it’s a manifestation of human nature. It rears its ugly head whenever one is given the power to censor or to silence, and whoever has this power will typically find a way to justify using it. The test lies in our commitment to principles, even when it’s in our best interest to ignore them.
Equally crucial is to use one’s voice for matters of importance. When we abdicate our voice to a vocal minority, they are the ones who get to shape our world. Throughout history, the revolutionaries have always been a vocal minority who claim to speak for the masses. But although the masses may not be part of this group, they—like everyone else—are affected by the actions of the revolutionary minority nonetheless.
Those insights come from Katherine Brodsky‘s article “How the social media mob helped me find my voice,” published on January 29th by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR). You’re welcome to read the full article.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Icicles, slender branches, and a blob
You’ve already seen how Bull Creek District Park hosted some great icicles on January 17th, the second day in a row when temperatures dipped down into the mid-teens overnight (around -10°C) and stayed below freezing all day. The top picture shows that in one place—just off to the left of the vista you saw last week—some of the icicles intermingled with a dense cluster of slender bare branches hanging downward. On the cliff side of that cluster a long ice blob had developed along the lowest portion of one branch, and the blob’s weight brought it down almost to the ice that covered the rocky ground beneath it. Whether your pareidolia will send you down to a CCC (certain cetaceous creature) remains to be seen.
✫
✫ ✫ ✫
✫
Toward the end of each year when I was a teenager I would buy the new edition of the Information Please Almanac and the World Almanac so I could learn lots of interesting facts about the world. The important word in that sentence is facts. You’ve probably heard it said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts, the idea being that an objective reality exists. Someone may not like the fact that in arithmetic 3 and 5 add up to 8 rather than to 35 or some other number, but in fact 3 and 5 stubbornly keep adding up to 8 every time, and no amount of complaining or wishful thinking will make that fact any less a fact.
Also a fact is that many people have mistaken notions about certain objective facts. What’s worse than being wrong per se is that those people may adopt worldviews and try to promulgate policies based on incorrect “facts.” Let’s take a case in point, namely a survey that Skeptic carried out in 2020 as part of the Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study (CUPES). The participants were 980 adults in the United States from the CUPES dataset that reported a consistent political orientation. One question was: “If you had to guess, how many unarmed* Black men were killed by police in 2019?” It was a multiple choice question, with the following choices: A) About 10 B) About 100 C) About 1,000 D) About 10,000 E) More than 10,000. Respondents were asked to pick the choice they felt was closest to the actual number.
Before I give you the results of the survey, take a moment and pick what you think is the most accurate answer. Then follow the arrows down, down, down to find out which answer is correct and what percent of the respondents got it right.
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
⥥
The Skeptic poll concluded that “The available data on police shootings of unarmed Black men is incomplete; however, existing data indicate that somewhere between 13-27 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Adjusted for the number of law enforcement agencies that have yet to provide data, this number may be higher, perhaps between 60-100. Yet, over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.”
An order of magnitude means a factor of 10, so “at least an order of magnitude” means that some “very liberal” respondents overestimated by more than a factor of 10. In fact about 22% of the people who described themselves as very liberal exaggerated by at least a factor of 100. So also did smaller percents of people in all four of the other political groups. In everyday life, exaggerating by a factor of 100 would mean believing that a loaf of bread costs $300, a cat weighs about 900 lbs., and the average human being lives to be 8000 years old.
With so many Americans being wrong—and sometimes wrong by a factor 100!—about the actual number of unarmed black men killed by police each year, how can there be a realistic discussion about policing? The correct answer is that there can’t be. Facts must come first, and policies must follow the facts.
* Just because someone isn’t holding a gun or knife or club doesn’t mean the person isn’t a threat. A large, strong man without a weapon who charges at you could still overwhelm you and either injure or kill you, especially if you’re smaller and weaker, as are most women compared to most men. If a nearby person suddenly charges at you, you have only a few seconds to decide what to do before that person reaches you.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Expected and unexpected
At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in south Austin on January 11th these bushy bluestem (Andropogon tenuispatheus) seed heads looked good backlit. The many polygonal optical artifacts in the background came to me free of charge so I’m passing them along to you gratis. And I guess I might as well also pass on another thing from that morning, a Virginia creeper vine (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) that still had abundant red leaves on it. Normally I’d have expected the last of this vine’s colorful foliage by mid-December or even sooner, like the ones alongside our house five weeks earlier.
(Also coming your way for free tomorrow after today’s warm interlude will be more ice pictures.)
❖
❖ ❖ ❖
❖
Don’t be fooled by media bias and fake news. We display the day’s top news stories from the Left, Center and Right of the political spectrum — side-by-side so you can see the full picture. Read our editorial philosophy.
That’s from a group called AllSides. Here’s more:
When we trust news teams to decide the truth for us, it is quite easy for bias and political agendas to come into play. We saw this with the media’s dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy and the media’s recent flip-flopping on the Wuhan Lab COVID origin theory. We saw it with The New York Times (Lean Left) spreading a false story about a Capitol rioter bashing a police officer with a fire extinguisher — a false story that was repeated endlessly by other media outlets and was even included in formal Trump impeachment papers. We also saw this when a New York Post (Lean Right) reporter resigned after publishing a false story about Kamala Harris that claimed copies of her children’s book were provided at taxpayer expense in a “welcome kit” for unaccompanied migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, Calif. These are to cite only a few examples within the last year or so.
You’re welcome to check out current stories on AllSides.
© 2024 Steven Schwartzman
Portraits of Wildflowers 