Fish for Friday

Edited by 
Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

The story ["So residieren Merkel und Obama"] may be in German, but the pictures of the Alpine area where the G7 are meeting in Bavaria's Schloss Elmau are in a language you can enjoy.

Thank you for recommending Alice Dreger's book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Her sum-up in the conclusion, "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," should be required reading:

When I joined the early intersex-rights movement, although identity activists inside and outside academia were a dime a dozen, it was pretty uncommon to run into evidence-based activists. Even rarer were data-oriented scholars who purposely took on advocacy work. Today, all over the place, one finds activist groups collecting and understanding data, whether they're working on climate change or the rights of patients, voters, the poor, LGBT people, or the wrongly imprisoned. It's also pretty easy to find university-based, data-oriented scholars in medicine, climate studies, and law who spend much of their time out of the ivory tower going to legislatures, courts, and policy meetings to advocate for marginalized individuals and endangered populations....
    The bad news is that today advocacy and scholarship both face serious threats. As for social activism, whikle the Internet has made it cheaper and easier than ever to organize and agitate, it also produces distraction and false senses of success. People tweet, blog, post messages on walls, and sign online petitions, thinking somehow that noise is change. Meanwhile, the people in power just wait it out, knowing that the attention deficit caused by Internet overload will mean the mob will move on to the next house tomorrow, sure as the sun comes up in the morning. And the economic collapse of the investigative press caused by that noisy Internet means no one on the outside will follow through to sort it out, to tell us what is real and what is illusory....
    The threats to scholars, meanwhile, are enormous and growing. Today over half of American university faculty are in non-tenure-track jobs...Not only are these people easy to get rid of if they make trouble, but they are also typically loaded with enough teaching and committee work to make original scholarship almost impossible. Even for the tenure-track faculty, in the last twenty years, universities have shifted firmly toward a corporate model in which faculty are treated as salespeople on commission. "Publish or perish" was the admonition when I was in graduate school, but today the rule is more like "external funding or expulsion."...Our usefulness is not measured by generation of high-quality knowledge but by the volume of grants added to the university economic machine. This mean our work is skewed toward the politically safe or, worse, the industrially expedient. Meanwhile, administrators shamelessly talk about their universities' "brands," and lately some are even checking to see if their faculty are appropriately adhering to "the brand." Yet more evidence of a growing and scary corporate mentality. Add to this the often unfair Internet-based attacks on researchers who are perceived as promoting dangerous messages, and what you end up with is regression to the safe – a recipe for service of those already in power.... [pp. 257-258]

Barge in: Heavy freight was moved along the Mississippi in large barges pushed by steamboats. These were hard to control and would sometimes swing into piers or other boats. People would say they "barged in."

Hillary Clinton made history last week by becoming the first Presidential candidate to push for Universal Voter Registration, an innovative policy that automatically registers every American citizen on their 18th birthday. In her speech, Clinton said:

We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country. Because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other.

Truth about "S'tralia"?

The map illustrates how large Australia is compared to other countries. The following is by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame.

Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the bottom half of the planet. It is recognizable from orbit because of many unusual features, including what at first looks like an enormous bite taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an accident of geomorphology, but they still call it the "Great Australian Bight", proving that not only are they covering up a more frightening theory but they can't spell either.
    The first of the confusing things about Australia is the status of the place. Where other landmasses and sovereign lands are classified as continent, island or country, Australia is considered all three. Typically, it is unique in this.

Having a bad day?

I will walk the beach, in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves, with abandon, if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They, too, will get old.

At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
    In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

• For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
• Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
• Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
• Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
• Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive–but it would run on only five percent of the roads.
• The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
• The air bag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
• Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
• Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
• You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

They have plotted deadly missions from undisclosed bases in the badlands of Somalia. In night raids in Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they returned soaked in their enemies’ blood and wielded weapons from high-tech rifles to primeval tomahawks.
    Those operations are part of the hidden history of Navy SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive but least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for risky but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine..."
    SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines" [By Mark Mazzetti, Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Serge F. Kovaleski, Sean D. Naylor, and John Ismay, NY Times]

European Starling

Nanosecond photo

Without stopping to take a look around, we can sometimes miss the transition of our surroundings from summer to autumn. Photos that compare various locations before and after they change into their autumn colours are revealing.
    Besides the nip in the air, the scarves, and the delicious autumn fruits and vegetables, the changing leaves are probably the greatest sign of autumn that there is. Chlorophyll, which is the green pigment in leaves that produces energy for trees, gradually breaks down in the fall, revealing the many other colors that also exist in leaves. That's where we get the rich browns, oranges, yellows and reds that we associate with the season.

Capitol Creek Valley

Glenfinnan Viaduct, Scotland

Have you ever wondered...what actually happens when you put a key into a lock?

The Classic Lunch Counter, 1960s

Hola! This will liven up your day! [3:33]

Limerick of the week:

People aver so many things as proof
there must be God, under floor, over roof –
    "Our parents told us so;
    they rarely lied, you know" –
recite them's all you have to do to spoof.

[Today's limerick was inspired by next week's "Thor's Day" column, "Why God just has to exist."].

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean