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What if some black holes aren’t black holes at all? A new theoretical study suggests that when a massive star collapses, it might not form a singularity hidden behind an event horizon. Instead, the collapse could trigger the birth of a tiny new universe inside the dying star. Driven by dark energy, this miniature cosmos would expand and push back against gravity, preventing complete collapse and creating an exotic object known as a gravastar.

To paraphrase the famous movie line, if the EBM you followed brought you to this, of what use was the EBM?

The post The Men of Data and Science Who Enabled the Quackery of MAHA and the Scientific Sabotage of MAGA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

It’s 2134, and humanity has finally embraced green technologies while ridding the Earth of harmful fossil-burning technologies, most notably gasoline, wood, coal, and oil. As a result, soot has been rendered obsolete, and all commercial products from soot, including shoes, wires, computer products, and eye products, are now produced from eco-friendly technologies. However, the uber-rich who still fancy non-eco-friendly products are willing to pay soot’s weight in gold for it. Therefore, the Exoplanet Research Corporation outfits its best ship to search for soot-enriched exoplanet atmospheres.

A review of God: The Science, The Evidence. The Dawn of a Revolution by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. 

The purported goal (stated in the Preface) of this book is “to shed light … on the question of the existence or non-existence of a creator God.” This professed evenhandedness is doubly (if not trebly) disingenuous. The actual purpose of the book is to argue not just for the existence of a creator God, but specifically the Christian God—and also not just the Christian God but specifically the God of Catholicism.

Protesting too much, elsewhere in the book the authors assert “the purpose of this book is not to militate for a particular religion,” but this is belied by six chapters with such titles as “The Alleged Errors of the Bible, Which Are Not Errors.” The entire book, in fact, is not good faith argument, but apologetics for a particular religion. It begins with this statement: 

Until recently, believing in God seemed incompatible with science. Now, unexpectedly, science appears to have become God’s ally. Materialism, which has always been a belief just like any other, is seriously shaken as a result.

This is sloppy if not entirely disingenuous. The authors use the word materialism as synonymous with naturalism (which is the philosophical foundation for science) but often seem just to mean atheism. And, of course, materialism is not just a neutral word for a philosophical stance; it also has a secondary negative meaning.

The argument rests initially on two pillars, neither of them novel or unfamiliar: the finitude of the universe (as confirmed by the Big Bang and somehow also the anthropic principle) and its supposed fine tuning. Elsewhere in the book the authors even assert that the “slander and harassment” supposedly “suffered” by the supporters of these two ideas serves as proof of their validity! And the authors reach their primary point less than halfway through the book: “That a creator God exists is the only obvious conclusion.” What, then, is the rest of the book about? 

Curves of Understanding

The title of the first chapter of the book repeats its subtitle, “The Dawn of a Revolution.” The authors assert that scientific advances beginning in the twentieth century have led to a complete reversal of the thinking that God was incompatible with the sciences, as illustrated in the two-page timeline that ends the chapter:

This diagram exhibits several peculiarities:

• The horizontal axis, representing time, is catastrophically distorted. The span from 1500 to 1900 takes a little less than 6"—about one and a half inches per century. The span from 1900 to 2000 measures a little more than 3", so about three quarters of an inch per century—already a serious distortion. But the span from the last figure on the left side (1896) to 1900 (only 4 years!) is a little over three inches, which would require more than six feet per century!  
• The vertical axis is unlabeled. The curve is meant to reveal the “rise and fall of materialist thought” (although upside down), so the vertical axis must be … immaterialism?
• The inclusion of Lamarck is dubious. Although he may have been the first naturalist of the period to propose a theory of evolution, it was wrong. In the history of the science of evolution, Lamarck is mentioned only in passing. The theory is of course properly attributed to Darwin and Wallace. In the timeline, Darwin is credited not with evolution but only natural selection, and Wallace doesn’t appear at all.
• The implication of the diagram is that everyone on the right side of the timeline (the part where the line is descending) is associated with the rise of “materialist thought” and everyone on the right is associated with its fall. Many of those on either side would dispute such characterizations.

Science

The authors repeatedly demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of science. The supernatural—literally, super (above, over, beyond) + natural—is not within the subject matter of science at all. And God is, as the authors themselves note, the quintessence of the supernatural.

Naturalism is the framework within which science is conducted. Without it, science simply can’t be done.

But the authors’ misunderstanding goes beyond this. Materialism (naturalism) is not, as they insist, “a belief just like any other.” Naturalism is the framework within which science is conducted. Without it, science simply can’t be done. 

Reinforcing this misapprehension, the authors refer to “the theory of a purely material universe.” The entire phrase is meaningless: it's not a theory, it's the ground on which the entire edifice of science stands.

Another persistent misunderstanding is that of the concept of proof and its applicability to science. As a website literally called The Logic of Science puts it, “Science doesn’t prove anything, and that’s a good thing.”

Although the authors actually acknowledge (with a quote from Karl Popper) that science doesn’t deal in proofs at all, they introduce the novel phrase “relative proof” (as opposed to “absolute proof,” which can only be found in logic, mathematics, and the like). This term is so eccentric in this context that a Google search for that exact phrase yields only websites devoted to the subject of genealogical proofs, such as the website of a professional genealogist literally named Relative Proof. 

The obsession with proof persists throughout the book. In a chapter bizarrely entitled “Preliminary Conclusions” (bizarre both because the phrase is almost oxymoronic and because it occurs over two hundred pages in), the authors say that “cosmology allows us to establish two separate proofs.” They are, of course, the Big Bang and fine tuning. 

The authors’ summary of what they call the scientific “approach” is childishly simplistic and misleading. For example, they write, “The first step … is to create a theory.” Well, no. The first step is to perform observations. In the context of the scientific method, theory means a scientifically acceptable or plausible general principle or body of principles based on data and offered to explain phenomena. A theory is a decisive step—but not the final step—in the process. The point of a theory is to provide a comprehensive understanding of a range of phenomena, not a single phenomenon. And, in any case, science continues far beyond the initial proposal of a theory. 

Perhaps the clearest indication that the authors fundamentally misconstrue science is a bizarre table showing what they call the six domains of supposedly scientific theories, ranging from Group 1 (Absolute Proof, which, including as it does mathematics and logic, doesn’t apply to the natural sciences at all and is, if to be included in the table at all, a Group 0) through Group 6 (“Theories without implications, and that are neither modelable nor subject to experimentation”). This classification is entirely idiosyncratic. The sciences are not grouped by the level of support of “proof” possible, but by their subject matter.

Even more remarkable is the set of examples the authors choose for Group 5 (“Theories that can be tested against reality, but that are neither modelable nor subject to experimentation”), which include: 

evolution, paleontology, origin of life on Earth, origin of the Moon, origin of water, existence of a creator God

In the last column (“Force of Proof”) is the cell for this group: “The strength of the proof depends on the quality and number of correspondences between the implications of the theory and observable reality.”

There’s no branch of science examining the “existence of a creator God.” Although the word theology looks like it refers to the science of God, it's not a science at all, but a subject in a Catholic seminary. One of the authors (Bonnassies), in fact, earned a B.A. in Theology from the Catholic Institute of Paris.

The Big Bang

The authors assert that the discovery that the universe had a beginning (the Big Bang) was a devastating blow to materialism. No such blow occurred. Such discussions are on forums like Reddit and Quora; religious websites; and books of apologetics, not in scientific labs. According to the authors, the Big Bang refutes materialism because ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing). This is, of course, the Kalam cosmological argument (as the authors themselves acknowledge): 

Premise: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause—namely, God.

But it’s not as if, before the discovery of the Big Bang, materialism was the dominant view. Quite the contrary—when the universe was believed to be eternal, the same argument was widely used—having been traced back to at least Aristotle and Plato. The authors even manage to rope in the heat death of the universe as further proof:

Premise: The universe is going to end.
Premise: Everything that is going to end has a beginning.
Premise: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause—namely, God.

The authors even draft the theory of relativity into the argument:

Premise: “space, time, matter, and energy are interrelated.”
Premise: “no single one of them can exist without the others.”
Conclusion: “if a cause exists at the origin of our universe, it's necessarily atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial”—namely, God.

All of these arguments can be consolidated thusly: 

Premise: The existence of the universe is inexplicable. 
Conclusion: Therefore, God.

Again and again, the authors insist that the discovery that the universe had a beginning decisively refutes any possible naturalistic explanation for its existence. But, of course, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other religious adherents alreadybelieved that the universe had a beginning. But many religions believe in both God and an eternal universe, including Hinduism, Jainism, and Mormonism (remarkably, Mormons consider themselves Christians—they accept Jesus as the savior—even if most Christians do not).

There’s no branch of science examining the “existence of a creator God.”

With or without the Big Bang—with or without a beginning of the universe—the argument is the same. The notion that the Big Bang (and other twentieth century scientific discoveries) rendered naturalism false is absurd—however many pages the authors spend pleading it. Furthermore, even if the argument were valid, it would only prove a First Mover—the noninterventionist God of Deism. But, as we’ll see, the authors argue for a specifically Christian God (actually, an even more specifically Catholic God), along with the Bible, miracles, and the whole lot.

Fine Tuning

According to the authors, “The values of these numbers [the so-called constants of nature] were fixed at the moment the Universe came into being.” This is both disingenuous and unsupported. The passive voice (“fixed”) implies agency—who better an agent than God? And the notion that they could have been any values other than what they are is entirely speculative. The authors finish that sentence by asserting that they “are invariable in time and space.” But this is an open question. 

Later in the book, in the chapter about biology, the authors assert that “biological fine-tuning is added to the cosmological fine-tuning.” Sean Carroll and others have observed that, even discounting the notion of a multiverse of one sort or another, there are several problems with the fine-tuning argument, not the least of which involved the anthropic principle.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom reports, in fact, that there are over 30 versions of the anthropic principle that range from the weak or tautological (“conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist”) to the strong (“the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life”).

Clearly, the authors espouse not only the strong version—but specifically the notion that this proves the existence of a creator God. It is, in other words, just another version of the fine-tuning argument, which Douglas Adams ridiculed with what has come to be known as the puddle analogy:

If you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"The Multiverse

Although the concept of multiple universes is ancient, in the modern era it's most closely associated with the Many Worlds Interpretation of Hugh Everett, which he introduced as a way to resolve the (supposed) problem of the quantum collapse. 

The authors mention the concept of the multiverse early as an example of “speculative theories to counter the Big Bang.” But no scientist has suggested that the multiverse might “counter” the Big Bang.

The authors devote an entire chapter to the subject (“The Multiverse: Theory or Loophole?”), which they regard as invented purely to avoid the dilemma of what they see as only two possibilities: “a creator God or pure chance.” They claim that the notion of the multiverse is, quoting Neil Manson, “the last resort for the desperate atheist.”  

The notion that the Big Bang (and other twentieth century scientific discoveries) rendered naturalism false is absurd.

As the authors show, many theorists have been troubled by the universe's apparent fine tuning—and see a multiverse as a way of explaining it. But the multiverse was developed by Hugh Everett in studying quantum mechanics, not by atheists disputing God or trying to avoid “the real metaphysical questions at stake.”

Biology

The chapter on biology recapitulates observations that life is incomprehensibly complex and that the origin of life seems unfathomably improbable: 

Premise: Biology is incredibly complex.
Premise: The origin of life appears to be incredibly improbable.
Conclusion: Therefore, God.

The authors reinforce these two points laboriously. They leave unclear whether they believe that life arose because God arranged things at Creation (the Big Bang) to make it inevitable, or because God intervened at various points to ensure it arose in the face of otherwise astronomically poor odds. 

Appeal to Authority

Not content with scattering quotations from notable people throughout the book, the authors appeal to authority in four entire chapters:

13. One Hundred Essential Citations [by which the authors mean quotations] From Leading Scientists
14. What Do Scientists Believe In?
15. What Did Einstein Believe In?
16. What Did Gödel Believe In?

In Chapter 14, the authors worry over the commonly held belief that “modern scientists are not very religious, or at least far less religious than the general population.” Their excuses, caveats, and quibbles notwithstanding, that’s true. In the United States (and throughout the countries of the world except for a few such as Turkey and India), scientists are much less likely to believe in a personal God than the rest of the population.

Earlier in the book, before devoting an entire chapter to him, the authors mention that Einstein famously said “God does not play dice.” The actual quotation (“I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”) is found in a letter Einstein wrote to Max Born specifically disputing the then-new theory of quantum mechanics. This context matters.

Evidence from Outside the Sciences

The next section of the book includes additional material on several unscientific topics:

• The Jews (a.k.a., in the book, “The Hebrews”). In a chapter arguing that the Bible contains “truths” that were “humanly inaccessible” at the time it was written, and a separate chapter recounting the history of the Jews from ancient times through the Six-Day War of 1967, the authors imply (but never explicitly state) that the Jews were and are God’s chosen people. They argue that the Jews’ supposedly uncanny ancient knowledge and later improbable history both imply an interventionist God.
• The inerrancy of the Bible. In both the chapter about the Jews and that one arguing that the apparent (“alleged”) errors were not actual errors, the authors argue that the Bible is inerrant. Their main argument is that the book was written specifically for the ancient Hebrews, and for that reason composed in largely metaphorical language. But the main assertion is that The Bible is not literal: it “pursues purely supernatural ends, and therefore corrects only those errors that prevent us from understanding who God is.” 
• “Jesus is the Messiah and God incarnate.” To exclude so many of the rest—even those that might completely agree with the idea of a creator God—is curious. Elsewhere in the book, in a long footnote, the authors characterize the ideas of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Brahmanism about the origin of the Universe as “rarely rationally articulated,” and whose adherents “struggle to present them coherently.” Islam (about 25% of the world population), which also espouses a creator God, goes entirely unmentioned. 
• The miracles in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. By including these purported miracles (as well as the Shroud of Turin) in a book supposedly about the scientific evidence for God, the authors identify themselves as apologists specifically for Catholicism, since other Christian churches don’t recognize them. 
• Argument from Emotions. Although, early in the book, the authors assert that “emotions come into play when we evaluate a claim and its conclusions” (implying that they may distort such evaluation), in Chapter 22, they tell us to perform “an exercise in listening to the interior voice.” After recapitulating an explanation of the origin of conscience in evolutionary psychology, they ask, “Is it compatible with what you feel?”
• “Philosophical Proofs”: A recapitulation of arguments, both ancient and modern, supposedly proving the existence of God. Almost all of these arguments (some of which, of course, recapitulate those already presented) assert only a creator God—not the specific Catholic God of the authors. 

We are, by this point, far from supposedly scientific evidence. 

Straw Man Argument

Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly recite ideas that a “coherent” materialist supposedly must believe. Some of these are indeed widely believed by atheists, such as:

• “Miracles cannot exist.” 
• “Prophecies and revelations cannot exist.”
• “The spirit world—including devils, angels, evil spirits, possessions, exorcisms—does not exist.”
• “Deterministic laws apply universally.”
• “All processes in the Universe … operate solely through chance and necessity.”

In the penultimate chapter (“Materialist Arguments against the Existence of God”), the authors assert arguments that, for the most part, materialists (atheists) don’t make—either disbelieving or simply lacking a belief. But the authors all but argue that the burden of proof is on the materialist: “Believing in nothing is a belief in itself and an active choice.” Really? And is belief really a choice?

God Books in Context

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the general interest in the subject, this book is one of an established genre. A search for “God and science” on Amazon, for example, returns over 10,000 results (curiously, reversing the search for “science and God” generates over 50,000 results), including: 

• The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom
• Finding God in Science
• Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix?
• God, Science, and Religious Diversity: A Defense of Theism
• Science Confirms the Existence of God
• Science and God: Do You Have to Choose?
• From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness
• Science and God: How Science and Logic Support the Bible
• God Speaks Science: What Neurons, Giant Squid, and Supernovae Reveal About Our Creator
• Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
• Science Confirms the Existence of God
• Finding God In Science: The Extraordinary Evidence for the Soul and Christianity, A Rocket Scientist’s Gripping Odyssey
• God and god of Science
• God Discovery: How Science and Logic Reveal the Existence of God
• The Call of Wonder: How the God of Reason Created Science in His Image

The list goes on and on. And, of course, there are also many books of religious apologetics (such as William Lane Craig’s The Kalām Cosmological Argument) without the words God and science in the title.

Apparently, a lot of Christians (to whom nearly all of these books appear to be specifically addressed) are worried about the apparent conflict and are looking for a comforting reconciliation. But from the sheer length of that list, it can be inferred that the worry isn’t easily relieved. 

Meanwhile, materialist scientists remain entirely unpersuaded.

We have three cat-related items today, the first from the  Journal of Chemical Ecology. Click to read it, and after doing so you might consider giving your cats silver vine rather than catnip.

Silver vine (Actinidia polygama) grows in the mountainous areas of NE Asia, and has long been known as a cat attractant. Here’s a photo from Wikipedia labeled, “A silver vine plant with the eponymous silver markings on its leaves.”

Qwert1234 at ja.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia says this about its effect on cats. (it has other medicinal and culinary uses for humans):

Silver vine has long been known to elicit euphoric response in cats.  The reaction to silver vine is similar to the response to catnip, but appears to be more intense. Silver vine is an alternative to catnip, and many cats that do not react to catnip will respond positively to silver vine powder made from dried fruit galls.  Typical behaviors include rolling, chin and cheek rubbing, drooling, and licking. The effect usually lasts between 5 and 30 minutes, but afterwards cats exhibit a refractory period lasting roughly an hour during which they are unresponsive to further dosage.

A study published in January 2021 suggests that felines are specifically attracted to the iridoids nepetalactol and nepetalactone, present in silver vine and catnip, respectively.  The compounds were found to repel mosquitos, and it is hypothesized that rubbing against the plants provides the cats with a chemical coat that protects them against mosquito bites.

That sounds weird but may be true: cats’ behavior may have evolved so that the moggy became attracted to the plant and rubs all over it: those cats who behave this way get fewer mosquito bites.  I suspect that’s wrong, though. Do cats get malaria or other reproduction-reducing maladies from mosquitoes?

Here’s a gif from Wikipedia of “A cat under the influence of Actinidia polygama“. It’s baked!

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Chemical cues that appear potent in controlled laboratory bioassays do not necessarily function as effective behavioural cues under natural conditions, where animals can freely approach or ignore stimuli. How chemical detectability translates into voluntary behavioural engagement, therefore, remains an important unresolved question. Plant-derived semiochemicals provide a tractable system for examining this issue because the same compounds can be presented either as intact natural sources or as purified chemicals. Domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) show a characteristic self-anointing response to iridoid-producing plants, including catnip (Nepeta cataria) and silver vine (Actinidia polygama), both widely regarded as cat-attractants. Here, we tested whether these plants differ in their ability to induce voluntary engagement under free-choice conditions. Free-roaming cats rarely showed self-anointing behaviour (face-rubbing and rolling) toward intact catnip plants, but consistently engaged with silver vine. The same bias toward silver vine was observed in captive cats presented simultaneously with plant extracts. Chemical analyses confirmed that catnip contained abundant bioactive nepetalactone, indicating that weak responsiveness was not explained by a lack of bioactive compounds. These findings demonstrate that chemical abundance and laboratory bioactivity do not necessarily predict behavioural reliability under natural encounter conditions. Instead, whether a cue consistently elicits voluntary engagement may determine its ecological effectiveness as a behavioural cue.

But can you buy silvervine, and is it dangerous? The answer to the second question is a firm “no”; vets say it is safe and nontoxic. The only dangers are possible ingestion of chew sticks if you buy silvervine in that form, and some stomach upset if the cat ingests too much.  Here’s Grok’s summary:

Silvervine comes in safe forms like powder (from the fruit galls), sprays, toys, and the aforementioned sticks. Powder or sprays are often sprinkled on toys, beds, or scratching posts. Some products are designed for light ingestion.In short: Silvervine is one of the safest and most effective plant-based enrichments for cats. It’s widely recommended by vets as a catnip alternative with an excellent safety profile. If your cat has any pre-existing health conditions, it’s always wise to check with your veterinarian before introducing new toys or treats, but for the vast majority of healthy cats, it’s perfectly fine and enjoyable. As for buying it, Amazon has a gazillion silvervine items on its site, including sticks, powder, and toys. The sticks have another advantage over catnip: they clean the cat’s teeth when it’s chewing them. If you’ve used silver vine, report below, or try them out!

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The Good News Girl reports on something that cat cognoscenti have known for a long time: Disneyland is populated by over 200 feral cats recruited to keep the rodent populations down (not Mickey or Minnie, I hope!). Here’s her report, click to hear:

Here’s a longer but good video  (6-minutes) explaining the origin of the cats and their care (they get food and veterinary care, and are also trapped and neutered). Kittens or overly familiar cats get adopted out.

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Finally, in one Indiana city, at one time seven years ago, you could pay off parking tickets by giving the cops food for cats! I saw this on FB and decided to check it out:

Here’s a 2019 article from the Washington Post about the program, though my investigation showed that this program operated only in Indiana in 2019 and is no longer in practice. In some places, however, you can pay tickets by giving food for homeless people.

An excerpt:

There were too many kittens in the animal shelter, just as there had been last year and the year before that. Like other shelters that swell to capacity during cats’ annual breeding season, Muncie Animal Shelter in Indiana was struggling this summer to meet the need.

“One day I was standing by the counter and somebody brought in six kittens,” said Officer Chase Winkle, a spokesman for the Muncie Police Department. “And before they could get those checked in, somebody came in with another four.”

To ease the pressure, police created a trade-off: For five days in July, people could pay for their parking tickets by donating to the shelter the equivalent value of cat food or litter. Residents who brought their donations to the police chief’s office with a receipt proving the value got their tickets wiped away. A police officer’s daughter works at the shelter and had made the department aware of the organization’s need.

Muncie is among cities across the country that are opting temporarily to accept charitable donations in lieu of monetary payments for parking infractions. From Anchorage, to Woodstock, Va., municipalities are writing off tickets in exchange for school supplies or cat litter — a way to fill a community need while lessening the sting of getting a ticket. Some cities offer a discount to people who pay with a donation, while choosing the donation option in other municipalities simply allows the payer to feel good.

In Muncie, about a dozen people made donations to pay for roughly $600 in parking tickets, Winkle said. Only offenses that didn’t pose a safety hazard counted: Donations couldn’t resolve a moving violation or a ticket for parking in a handicap spot. Most tickets that people paid with donations were worth about $25 each and had been issued for parking too long in a certain zone, Winkle said.

From the CNN article above:

What’s the cost of a parking ticket in Muncie, Indiana? For a few days in July, it was a cat food or supplies donation for a local animal shelter.

In an effort to help the Muncie Animal Care and Services Shelter, the Muncie Police Department asked violators to pay their parking tickets in cat food.

The request came after a couple of officers toured the shelter and found that it was running short on supplies to care for over 350 cats and kittens.

“If you have a $25 parking ticket, you can bring up to $25 worth of cat food or litter to the Clerk’s Office, and you can get your parking ticket to go away with the exchange of the donation,” Officer Jamie Brown said on a July 15 video shared by the police department on Facebook.

Although the offer ran only from July 15 to 19, the department quickly learned that people will do practically anything when little balls of fur are involved.

“This room was almost empty before we started! Most of the folks that donated didn’t even have parking tickets,” Muncie Police said in a tweet with a photo of all the donations.

. . .”I don’t know if the police department plans on doing this again, but we’re incredibly grateful to them and the community. Their response was overwhelming,” Ashley Honeycutt, the shelter’s office manager, told CNN.

I think they need to reinstate this program!

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Lagniappe: A famous cat in a riad (a fancy Moroccan house converted into a boutique hotel). Click on the screenshot to read more,. but I’ve put the whole text below:

A small riad in the Marrakech medina has built a wall display in its entry courtyard out of guest reviews. The reviews are not about the riad. They are about the cat, an orange tabby named Mishmish, who has been working the front gate for about six years.

The owner started noticing the pattern when his bookings began increasing for reasons he could not initially explain. He pulled the reviews.

A representative selection: “Mishmish was very professional.” “Mishmish escorted us to our room and approved.” “The location was good but Mishmish was the highlight of our trip.” “Mishmish let me cry in the courtyard for a long time and did not say anything.”

The owner printed his ten favorites, framed them in cheap wooden frames, and hung them on the wall above the reception desk. Mishmish now sits underneath the display like a portrait subject seated beneath his own gallery.

Booking inquiries now routinely ask whether he will be on duty during the guest’s stay.

If you want to stay at this place, here’s how to do it (from Grok):

Riad Julines is praised overall for its clean, charming traditional Moroccan decor, friendly staff (like hosts Raja/Raga and Daniel), excellent breakfast on the terrace, indoor pool/terrace, and peaceful vibe despite the central location. It’s a boutique-style guesthouse that feels like a home.If you’re planning a stay and love cats, this riad is a great match—many reviews note how the resident cats enhance the experience. You can find it on Booking.com, TripAdvisor, or by searching “Riad Julines Marrakech.” Note that cat policies can vary, so confirm directly with the riad if you have allergies or preferences. Here’s a booking.com link.

h/t: Reese

Did you find the two California toads in this morning’s photo? Here’s Robert Lang’s reveal:

Yesterday I planned a full day of reading and writing for a project I’m working on, but was interrupted three times for duckling rescues, so in terms of “professional” work, I got nothing done. In terms of waterfowl work, I—with the help of others—did rescue eight stranded ducklings who would otherwise have died.  I suppose that’s a fair trade-off, but I really hope these rescues end: they do save lives, but they’re hard on the mother ducks, the ducklings, and on me.  Here are the three rescues.

RESCUE 1.  Around 11 a.m. I saw on the PondCam that a person was standing in the “wildlife area” where nobody is supposed to be. I wandered down to the Pond and found a young man staring fixedly at a spot in the pond—and there was a young (1-3 days old) duckling, paddling along by itself.

The guy, whose name was Arjun Dhar, told me he had found it wandering in the quad and had put it in the pond, hoping that some female would adopt it. Well, that’s a nice thought, but it wouldn’t work for any number of reasons, one being that there were no hens with babies in the pond.  Arjun said that now he wanted to rescue it and take it home to raise. That, too, involves formidable difficulties, and it would be better to take it to rehab. I told him to wait there, keep her eye on the baby, and I’d be right back.

I quickly returned with two nets and a “duck box”, a small box lined with soft paper towels in which to sequester rescues.  It was not that hard to net the baby, and I drove Arjun with me to the rehab volunteer, who lives nearby. Here’s Arajun, showing off the duckling after we scooped it out of the pond. He himself had worked at Lincoln Park Zoo and kept a huge collection of reptiles in his home, including a monitor lizard and a python. I hope to see this fellow animal lover around the pond.

I cuddled it for a second before taking it to rehab:

Fortuitously, there were two other volunteers at the rehabber’s house—the very two who captured Vashti’s babies a few days before—making a run to Willowbrook with a load of injured or orphaned wildlife. The rehab woman put the duckling in a paper back and off it went.  The car was also carrying a bald eagle, who had been in a tree the night before when, during the fierce storms over Chicago, the tree was struck by lightning. The eagle was not in good shape and apparently had a wound in the eye. When I asked the drivers if it would survive, they said they didn’t know. Here’s the poor thing:

RESCUE 2, around 12:30.  Right when I returned from the rehab woman, I saw a knot of people around the channel in the Pond, looking at a narrow spot between two rows of rocks by the drain. In that channel was another orphan duckling, and so I had to get my net and procure it, too, with the help of a member of our Department who sometimes helps Team Duck.  This duckling was diving each time I went for it, surfacing at some random locality.  I knew I could get it if it stayed in the narrow gap between the rocks, and when it dived I gently swept the ground under the water. Sure enough, I came up with a thoroughly wet and thoroughly muddy duckling.  I took it up to my office, dried it off, put it on my chest to warm up, and then put it in another small duck box that I placed next to a space heater. The poor thing was traumatized and not too vigorous, and I was afraid it would die.  But it didn’t.  Here it is on my desk and then on my chest:

I am dishevelled and unshaven; the duck business takes a lot out of you. You can see it’s still wet, but it dried quickly with paper towels and heat (hypothermia is a danger):

When I was catching that duckling, a lady told me that there was an entire brood wandering around the Quad with its mom. I said that I couldn’t go roaming the entire Quad trying to find it, as I was harried. But eventually someone contacted me about it, which led to the next rescue.  Before I recount that one, I have a theory, which is mine.  Rescue #1 probably involved a duckling fron the Quad brood, as the woman who put it in the pond found it there. And rescue #2 may well have been the leftover duckling from Vashti’s brood. I was told that they had recovered seven, for seven had hatched, but I found out when I met the rehabbers earlier that they missed one and got only six. The wet, muddy duckling was, I suspect, the one that was left behind.

On to. . .

Rescue 3. I was settled in my office with the duckling in a box at my feet, getting plenty warm from the space heater. I wss about to get to work when suddenly I got an email from a grad student, time-stamped 2:09 pm.:

Dear Dr. Coyne, A mother duck is limping on campus. She has brought her ducklings to Cobb Hall. Sorry to bother you if this is not abnormal, but thought you would want to know in case it is. Thanks, Jenks IB Student

No phone number was given, so I emailed Jenks to call me, which he did immediately. This time there was a whole brood far from water.  The choices were to herd them to Botany Pond, where they’d be driven out by the aggressive drake still here, or capture the entire family for removal to a rehab facility or a distant pond.  I had never captured a hen before, so I equipped myself with two nets and two duck boxes, with a big one for mom. I knew that there was little chance of catching the hen, but I also knew that if left alone, the whole brood would die. I decided to do what I could to capture the family; and if I couldn’t get mom, I’d take the babies to rehab.

I went over to Cobb Hall and met Jenks and his girlfriend Niyati, who was keeping watch on the brood. You can see them below: mom and six babies, walking around in the bushes. The mother had a very slight limp, but she waddled like all ducks, and Jenks mistook some of that waddling for limping.

I watched them for a while, and decided to get the babies, who were peeping, and put them in a box, knowing that mom would stay near the peeping and hoping I could catch her with my big net:

Photo by Jenks and Niyati (I cropped it).

Two very short videos taken by Jenks Hehmeyer and Niyati Jain, who both turned out to be biology grad students. Lovely and helpful people.

The mother did go near the box, which I put in an interior corner of the building to make capturing her easier. I have to admit that I had no idea how to handle a full-grown hen, but a CBCM (Chicago Bird Collision Monitor) volunteer told me to put it in a big box and cover it with a towel.  I had a big box but no towel.

At any rate, capturing the mother was futile.  I would think I had her cornered, and she’d fly straight up and around me.  I must have tried four or five times, and each time the mother would get more freaked out and wouldn’t come too close to the box.  It wss hot, the ducklings in the box were peeping (the mother pecked my leg from behind when I was gathering them), so I decided to take them to rehab, too. The stress-out orphan was still in my office by the space heater, and, returning to the lab to add the singleton to the six, I was delighted to see that that duckling had perked up, had pooped, was peeping, and was much more vigorous. They were on their way to rehab:

Here is the box o’ ducklings from rescue #3 before I added the one from the second rescue to the batch. They were all in good shape and very vigorous.

So that was the last rescue. I made a final foray around the Pond to see if there were any ducklings left behind (the motto of Team Duck is “no duckling left behind”), and then drove the box of seven back to the rehab lady who lives nearby.

After that I washed off my nets and tidied up, and then, too tired to finish the Hili dialogues, I drove home. (I almost always walk home, but had the car because I had gone shopping the day before.. That made driving the babies to the rescue liaison lady much easier.)

The upshot, again: three rescues, eight babies caught. I do hope they do well at the rehab facility, which I think is the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center. I’m told the survivorship of orphaned ducklings there is over 90%—much higher than the survivorship of any of these ducklings, which would be zero.

I should be happy about this but I was psychologically debilitated. I am not a resilient person and always tend to look on the dark side, so the quacking of the bereft mother, the peeping of the babies, and the stress involved in trying to net orphan ducklings in the pond had taken its toll. I’m not asking for pity, but only recounting that three rescues in one day is stressful and fatiguing, aeven when those these three rescues were, physically, a piece of cake.

I went home, lay down on my bed and sometime later wandered to the kitchen to get dinner.  This morning I wandered down to the Pond again, fearful I’d find another orphan. There weren’t any, but there was the aggressive drake, whose wife, I think, is the second hen who produced a brood in the pond—a brood that disappeared on the same day it came down.  She flew down to the pond from the windowsill when I was feeding the drake, so I suspect that she, like Vashti, is re-nesting.  If so, that could be good, as the only ducks in the pond now are her aggressive drake and herself, so there’s nobody to go after a new brood. (Fingers crossed!)

Perhaps we’ll have a viable brood of ducklings after all.  If that is the case, we can expect to see it around July 10.  That’s still a good time for ducklings as it takes them only eight weeks to get to the fledging stage. Stay tuned!

Today we have another “spot the” feature from Robert Lang, whose commentary is indented below.  Spot the two frogs! There will be a reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

The last two days on early-morning hikes, I’ve encountered literally dozens of tiny frogs hopping across the trail—so many that I had to watch my step to avoid them. Fortunately, on the light, sandy trail, they stand out pretty well, but once they get into the leaf litter on either side, they practically vanish. Today I brought my phone-camera on the hike, which means that it’s time for yet another “Spot the Froggies!”

My previous “Spot the Froggies” were California Tree Frogs (Pseudacris cadaverina), whose gray color made for perfect camouflage against streambed granite. I think these might be California Toads (Anaxyrus boreas halophilus)—I’ve seen full-size adults of the latter in this area, and I think I make out the beginnings of the white stripe running down the back of these subadults. I invite firm IDs from our herpetological expert fellow readers. These were taken along the Arroyo Seco, above JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] in Pasadena.

Here’s the “Spot-the” photo; there are two frogs in the picture (though it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more that I overlooked). Also attached is a close-up of one on my hand. (That’s his left leg extended, not a tadpole tail.)

Click to enlarge (I rate this “fairly easy”).  Please don’t reveal where they are in the comments, but you’re welcome to tell us if you found them, and how many you saw.

Again, reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

Using the Keck Observatory, astronomers measured the spins of dozens of giant planets and brown dwarfs orbiting distant stars. They found that giant planets can spin faster than much more massive brown dwarfs, challenging simple assumptions about mass and rotation. The results suggest that magnetic fields and formation processes play a major role in determining how fast worlds end up spinning.

My, how the week has flown!  We had bad storms on Thursday—part of the tornado/storm system that hit the Midwest. Luckily we didn’t lose power, though I had to drive the wrong way down a one-way street on my way to work: a large tree had fallen, locking off the legal route.

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 13, shabbos for Jewish cats, and also National Golf Cart Day.  Here’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with the irascible Larry David, showing the sequelae of his using the famous “drop and tug” strategy in golf.  As usual, David is in a golf cart when on the links.

 

It’s also International Drink Chenin Blanc Day (not bad advice), National Cupcake Lover’s Day (who is the person singled out here?), National Rosé Day (for wine), and World Gin Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 13 Wikipedia page.

There’s a Google Doodle today about the up-and-coming players on the U.S. World Cup team. Click the screenshot below to see what’s up:

Da Nooz:

*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal presents Part II of why proposed U.S. ceasefire agreements with Iran are “bad deals.”

This week saw multiple cases of the trope. On Sunday, we were supposedly so close to a deal that Trump demanded Israel take a direct Iranian attack on the cheek. Then, at the last moment, a U.S. helicopter was downed by Iranian fire, and the president declared they’d been “playing us for suckers.” Deal’s off.

What followed was a night of strikes, plans for another, even a declaration that “in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.” Then, at the last moment—crash. “Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved,” according to the White House, and Trump called off the strikes.

Charlie Brown isn’t the only one with a headache, and no one—except the Iranians—is laughing.

But much like the devil, the fate of this deal is in the details—and so far, the details look familiar. This MOU [Memorandum of Understanding]  appears nearly identical to the disastrous deal floated in late May, the one Trump abandoned after Republicans had an allergic reaction to it, while Iran reportedly concluded e was simply too desperate for a deal and they could wait him out.

Rather than a full agreement, what’s on the table is an MOU extending the ceasefire for 60 days while nuclear negotiations continue—and, despite the steep costs Israel recently paid to sever the two fronts, this one appears to fold Lebanon back in as well. On the nuclear file, the text lays out a framework for addressing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, though any actual action would wait on a second, more detailed accord.

Worse is the financial relief: according to the report, after reopening the strait, Iran would be given temporary sanctions waivers allowing it to sell oil for 60 days, generating precious revenue for Tehran. That relief would expand if Iran complies with the initial agreement and shows “good faith” in subsequent negotiations—though, as one diplomat put it, “there is no set date for sanctions relief, and it will be tied to the implementation of the deal.”

Less clear is what happens to the billions in Iranian funds frozen overseas. Iran has insisted it must receive some money immediately upon signing any initial deal, while the U.S. has said release would come in tranches based on compliance. Separately, the U.S., Iran and Qatar have reportedly discussed a mechanism letting Iran access some of its frozen funds in Qatar for humanitarian purchases. I’m not sure if Qatar is simply trying to make its terrorism support tax-deductible, but these payments are humanitarian in name only—just ask Hamas. Money is fungible, and the regime still controls imports, so it can either redirect funds from what little it gives its own population now that it is being covered by Qatar, or simply sell the humanitarian goods to its own population and pocket the revenue.

This deal can be judged by a simple test: does it merely pause the regime—leaving Iran roughly where it’s been since the blockade began—or does it rewind the clock, leaving Tehran better off than before? If sanctions are eased and frozen assets unlocked, it’s definitely the latter.

As one very senior Israeli official put it to me this morning, the deal is “shit.”

. . . The good news is that nothing’s locked in—the gaps between the parties remain huge—and given how fond Trump has grown of yanking the football away at the last second, maybe this time it’s the Ayatollah who ends up flat on his back.

Every day things go back and forth here, but if Trump is going to make a deal, it has to be one that allows him to claim that the U.S. “won”.  And now the negotiations are extended for another two months, so Trump can’t really claim he “won” until the end of August at the earliest—and that’s getting close to the midterms.

*This NYT op-ed is clickbait for me, though when you click on the screenshot, you’ll see that the title has changed—whoops, it changed back again. (Thearticle is archived here). But of course the “winning issue” turns out to be screwy: it’s DATA CENTERS, Jake!

An excerpt (article is archived here):

Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

What Ms. Cottom doesn’t realize is that most Americans couldn’t even tell you what a data center is, that data centers are vitally important in today’s computer-infused world, and their impact could be minimized by putting them in remote areas. Yes, they have problems, but as far as I can see, we’re better off with them than without them. However, given the widespread ignorance about these matters, Cottom tells us Dems, “Hop on the issue pronto!”:

Democrats need organized voters. The political mobilization that the civil rights movement built and that has propelled Democrats to victories across the country is aging. The G.O.P. is racing to disorganize and dilute Black electoral power across the South and the Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Your guess about the Democratic Party’s plan to fill the gaps is as good as mine. The party seems to want some kind of economic populist message without embracing the demographic reality that a member of the working class is just as likely to be Black or a woman as a white dude in a Carhartt. Whether the data center resistance is a blip or a beginning of a new political imagination, it refutes the idea that you cannot have it all: populist energy, an economic message and a multiracial coalition that crosses class divides, in the South and beyond. Why aren’t Democrats jumping at the chance to get into the fight?

You know why. It’s not an important issue to most Americans, and data centers are not going to be pivotal in electing Democrats.

. . . . To win the future, Democrats have to survive the midterms. We have lived in Trump’s America for a decade now. Almost none of us are better off for it. The voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different. If the Democrats want to convince us that they are the party to get us there, they need a plan to rebuild institutions, rebalance the branches of power and restore faith in the system. They also need a national message equal to the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for. In the end, it’s simple.

We can win. That’s it. That’s the message.

There’s another message: Cotton has wasted 1,728 words conveying a message that, to me, is trivial and useless for winning elections. You be the judge.

*Yesrterday’s NYT’s morning newsletter announced that SpaceX was going public, and the sale of shares may make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire: that is one thousand billion dollars. Here are the details:

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket-building, satellite-launching and artificial intelligence company, is set to go public today at $135 a share. The company plans to sell 555 million of them. That means SpaceX would raise around $75 billion, putting its valuation at $1.77 trillion, the largest I.P.O. in history.

It could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Or it could tank. Some analysts have argued that SpaceX is significantly overvalued. The market could decide that Musk’s an overpromiser and pass on the stock’s high price. (Remember his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion in 2022? The company, now known as X, saw its ad revenue decline by 65 percent last year. Musk folded it into his A.I. company, xAI. Which is now part of SpaceX.)

“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” one career investor told The Times.

Plenty of people will get rich anyway. One launch engineer who worked at the company for 12 years told The Times he’d earned more than 100,000 shares during his tenure. At $135 a pop, his SpaceX stock would be worth at least $13.5 million at some point today. Even if the price drops by half, he’d still have millions on paper. “The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” he said.

Or look to Antonio Gracias, one of Musk’s staunchest friends and business allies. He and his private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, have a $65 billion stake in SpaceX at its target I.P.O. valuation. If the stock soars, Gracias will instantly become one of the world’s richest human beings.

The NYT tells us what we should know before investing in SpaceX, though by now it’s a bit too late. Here’s how you can buy it—even if you don’t intend to.

When firms go public, they usually reserve a small sliver of their stock for individuals, with the bulk going to giant investors like asset managers and hedge funds.

SpaceX, however, sought commitments from individuals for up to 20 percent of its shares, much larger than a typical offering.

Some of those shares set aside for individual investors will be available under the SPCX ticker on online brokerage platforms like Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab and SoFi.

For anyone looking to buy SpaceX shares, the brokerages have said investors may not get the total number that they request, given a limited supply of stock at the initial offering price.

“Here, you ask for 1,000 shares — maybe you’ll get 300; maybe you’ll get 50,” said Jay Ritter, an I.P.O. expert at the University of Florida.

Individuals may find themselves owning SpaceX shares even if they didn’t actively choose to invest.

The Nasdaq-100, a popular index that tracks the top 100 nonfinancial companies listed on that exchange, recently relaxed its rules to make it easier and faster for SpaceX to be included. That will force funds that track the index to invest in SpaceX practically overnight.

When the stock starts trading on Friday, investors can buy the shares on the open market, but they probably won’t be able to purchase them at the I.P.O. price of $135 a share. The stock could open at a lower or higher price, depending on what type of demand the company’s bankers can muster up ahead of the first trade.

I ain’t buying any. One thing I’ve learned in investing (and I’ve been doing it for years, limiting myself largely to Vanguard mutual funds), is not to try to time the market, and not to buy individual stocks.  Following those rules has given me a comfortable retirement, and I ain’t about to change them now.

*Well, writing this on Friday afternoon, I see that Musk has indeed become the world’s first trillionaire, as SpaceX stock went sky-high. From the WSJ:

SpaceX’s shares rose about 30% over their opening price as the largest-ever IPO had Wall Street and investors around the world glued to their screens.

The stock opened trading at $150, 11% above the IPO price of $135. The initial climb gave it a market cap above $2.2 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable U.S.-listed company.

Elon Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX—trading under the ticker SPCX— went public. His stake in the rocket maker was valued at around $690 billion at the IPO price, while his Tesla stake makes up around $279 billion of his net worth.

Lead banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will take home the biggest share of the IPO fees, getting a combined 40% or around $100 million apiece.

Some users reported issues with Robinhood’s platform in the half hour or so after shares of SpaceX started trading, with reports dropping off after noon.

Some skeptics think SpaceX’s sky-high valuation is much too high.

And here’s how the stock jumped (from the WSJ):

Non, je ne regrette riens.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “We economists have done the maths.”

→ Insane amounts of money are about to be made: With the SpaceX IPO, it’s estimated that more than 4,000 people are about to become millionaires, with 400 projected to have fortunes over $100 million. And then there’s the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. Between space and LLMs, we’re looking at a new generation of wealth. And if I can climb back on my California soapbox for a moment, it’s always amazing to me that the East Coast produces none of this. The East Coast is the Europe of America. You go to New York when you decide it’s time to hire a dozen ADHD-identified individuals in Brooklyn who will sue you, not like, build stuff. For that, it’s all still the Bay Area or, thanks to SpaceX, Texas! And in the boom times, one group that’s thriving is (of course) prostitutes. Forbes has an amazing story about the nerdy escort boom. These ladies are charging upward of $2,000 an hour, even as much as $6,000 an hour—and you know they’re spending most of that hour talking about Moravec’s Paradox. One reports charging $23,000 a day. The absolute weirdest people in America have created artificial consciousness (probably Satanic) and despite all their efforts, they still exist in these pesky bodies that demand stupid things like [redacted], which the computer can’t quite do yet. Good for the prosties.

In other signs of new financial realities, women are hiring witches to help protect their weddings, or so Bloomberg tells us this week. Is it just me, or is heterosexuality getting weirder than being gay? Prostitutes and witches? Maybe you guys should take Pride this year, I think you need it.

→ Finally, data on how many girls were given testosterone: At the height of the movement to medically transition gender-dysphoric kids, it was always a little unclear how many kids were affected. Like, how riled up should we all get, really? Now we have data and a great write-up thanks to the brave journalist Benjamin Ryan. In Oregon, from 2016 to 2023, about 1 in 250 girls were taking testosterone by age 17. And that number was likely increasing every year in that time frame, so by 2023 it was probably a lot more than 1 in 250. That is objectively wild. That is a huge number of girls being put on testosterone, which alters them permanently, for life. Their voices, their bone structure. In retrospect, the reactions to this over the past few years were probably too muted! Here’s the chart Benjamin Ryan put together, based on a recent study of insurance data for 2016–2023:

Rarely do I look back on a moral panic and think, wow, we did exactly the right thing in response to it. Rarely do you say, it’s a good thing we panicked there or things could’ve gotten really bad! But in this case, it’s the truth. Doctors were drugging every gender-nonconforming girl they could get their paws on. Any girl going through puberty and feeling a little weird was offered. . . testosterone! An army of desexed girls was created. It’s really so dark. There is no way in hell I would have survived this maw. If I’d been born just a few years later, I would have been puberty-blocked and T’ed so fast, and then I’d never have children and have to shave my face forever. Equally terrible.

→ Now some good news: A number of pro-Hamas conspirators accused of haunting University of Michigan leaders have been indicted by a federal grand jury. Federal prosecutors say the conspirators, who were “associated with the University of Michigan,” did things like throwing “glass jars filled with butyric acid and dye into the homes” of their targets. Here’s a nice little excerpt from our activists’ messages (you bet one was a medical student!):

These are cries for liberation, don’t you see! Sweet poetry for stolen lands. If you think there’s not medical torture happening right now by this guy’s fellow ideologues, you’re fooling yourself. Stay healthy out there! Don’t end up in an emergency room! If Bari ever does, I’ll just say goodbye at the door because we all know she ain’t comin’ out.

Meanwhile, the Students for Justice in Palestine group at the University of Colorado Boulder issued a statement honoring a local terrorist for his murder of a local elderly Jewish woman. Remember the guy who firebombed that group who had gathered in honor of the Hamas hostages? That guy, who killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond and burned a bunch of other folks? “One year ago today, on June 1st, 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman took direct action against one manifestation of the Zionist death cult that we have allowed to fester in our city,” the student group posted, adding that the killer “chose the only sane response available to a rational human being.” Totally open blood lust. And to think, Colorado is so beautiful! They could be hiking and enjoying themselves, having a nice beer brewed right in town paired with some bison jerky and a burrito. Instead, they’re celebrating the death of an old Jewish woman. Odd.

They’re also celebrating the injuries sustained by more than a dozen other people in Soliman’s firebombing; see the NYT article here. And do look at the archived Students for Justice in Palestine site’s response to see how horrific that organization is.  Here’s a screenshot of part of it. Oy!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is hiding from Hili:

Szaron: I know you’re coming this way.
Hili: How do you know?
Sharon: The stones told me.

In Polish:

Szaron: Wiem, że tu idziesz.
Hili: Skąd wiesz?
Szaron: Kamienie mi powiedziały.

*******************

From Stacy:

From Addicted to Ducks, showing how they’re superior to chickens:

From Things With Faces: a horrifying and ghoulish yogurt:

I’ll give only two tweets today as yesterday I engaged in three duckling rescues yesterday (total of eight ducklings saved) and was busy much of the day. Photos follow, including one of a bald eagle taken to rehab (no, I did not find that one!).

Here is a video tweet from Masih showing a Taliban truck running over four women who dared to go to a seminar on education. For some reason they’ve made it un-embeddable, but if you click on the screenshot you’ll see it. (WARNING: women getting hit by a truck):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was one year old, and would be 85 today had he lived. https://t.co/4a2MKehu2r

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 13, 2026

A bold claim that the universe’s accelerating expansion was an illusion has been put to the test—and failed. Researchers found that the study behind the controversy made key mistakes when analyzing supernova data. After revisiting the evidence, astronomers concluded that cosmic acceleration remains as strong as ever.

A bold claim that the universe’s accelerating expansion was an illusion has been put to the test—and failed. Researchers found that the study behind the controversy made key mistakes when analyzing supernova data. After revisiting the evidence, astronomers concluded that cosmic acceleration remains as strong as ever.

NASA-supported scientists have provided new information about how the early Earth may have acquired some elements necessary for the planet to become habitable. They also suggest a new role for Jupiter in the distribution of these elements throughout the young solar system. The study, published in Science Advances, examines this history by looking at the ratio of phosphorus to nitrogen in iron meteorites and in younger objects known as chondrites.

We know that members of Gen Z are less likely to be in a steady relationship than millennials were at their age, but previous research missed out an important factor that actually widens the relationship recession

We can no longer ignore the growing threat of fully autonomous weapons. The world must either act to ban them or accept that they are the future of war

Last year, a study sent a quiet tremor through the field of cosmology. A team of researchers claimed that the universe's expansion might be slowing down, not speeding up, suggesting that dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the cosmos apart, could be weakening. If true, it would have shaken the foundations of our understanding of the universe. Now, a new study including two Nobel laureates has looked carefully at the evidence and reached a clear verdict - crisis averted.

Every so often, the Sun hurls billions of tonnes of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and if a big one hits at the wrong moment, the consequences for satellites, power grids, and communications systems could be catastrophic. Our best defence is to predict them before they happen, and that means watching the Sun's magnetic fields constantly and precisely. Now, a component smaller than a shirt button could transform how we do exactly that.

Every galaxy you've ever seen in a photograph is hiding something. Beyond the glowing disc of stars and gas that the camera captures lies a vast, ghostly outer region called a halo, too faint to see easily but packed with clues about how that galaxy came to be. ESA has just formally committed to a mission designed to reveal those hidden haloes in unprecedented detail, and in doing so, finally answer one of the most fundamental questions in astronomy: how did galaxies like our own Milky Way form?

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “twist,” is labeled as “a Friday flashback from 12 years ago.”  Once again Mo shows his characteristic behavior of instantiating exactly what he objects to.

Here’s the second part of “duck doings” (first part here), this part recounting the attempt to capture Vashti and her brood before it got to the pond, where it would harassed out by the resident aggressive ducks. I’ll put it up for the record, as part 1 didn’t attract much interest.

On May 15, Vashti was gone from the pond most of the day, and it was that day I marked on my calendar as the day she began incubating her eggs.  Since incubation is about 28 or 29 days, I calculated that her babies would hatch around June 12 or 13, and also marked those on my calendar as “jump days.”  As with last time, the spoiled hen came down from the nest about once a day in the afternoon to get a good cleaning, preening, and of course a big meal. I observed her as she flew back to the next, and, sure enough, she went back to the identical first-floor windowsill in Erman Hall, right beside the pond.  When I first went inside to see what was going on, she had laid eggs in the very same nest she used last time. The room inside the windowsill was a largely unused lab, and her nest was now well hidden by ivy, so she had only a small chance of being disturbed.

There were 7 light-green eggs in the nest. It was hard to photograph through a screen from the inside, but here’s the nest with eggs (I ran inside and took a photo while she was having her daily meal/spa break, which lasted anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes:

Vashti on the nest. Note that it’s lined with soft duck down, which she had plucked from her breast to cushion the eggs.  She turns the eggs from time to time so that they incubate evenly.

I took a video of her flying up to her windowsill nest.  It happened quickly, and she’d do it only when other ducks were not around, presumably to avoid interlopers going after her or the eggs. Sometimes I’d have to spend a long time keeping aggressive ducks away from her while she bathed and ate, and then away from the main pond when she was ready to fly up. Note the Armon is nearby to guard her.

Here are Armon and Vashti before she left the pond to incubate her eggs:

And Vashti having her meal during incubation. What she’s eating here are pellets of Mazuri Waterfowl Maintenance Diet: a complete diet for ducks that I buy in 50-pound bags. I also give the ducks freeze-dried mealworms that I get from Amazon. They are a real treat: the ducks love them above all other foods, and they are packed with protein and lipids.  These are spoiled ducks, I tell you.  (Babies are fed Mazuri Waterfowl Starter, which is nearly identical to the adult diet but comes in smaller pellets that the babies are able to ingest.)

A few pictures of the handsome Armon, who was an attentive, protective, and handsome father.  I love the curly feathers on his butt, and can’t help but think that females look at them when assessing whether a drake could be their mate:

Ignore the duck poop. . .

Armon drinking, too lazy to get into the water. This is what we call a “Dali Duck“.

And a headshot of dad:

The rest of the story can be related briefly.  I observed Vashti every time she flew down from the nest, and the upshot was that if the other ducks (another pair plus itinerant drakes) saw her, they would go after her, forcing her to fly off the pond. (She would return, but I sometimes had to keep those ducks away from her.)

I concluded that, like the first time she had ducklings, this time would also result in her leaving the pond after too much aggression.  And that would mean death for all the ducklings. The only alternative was to somehow capture her and her brood, ideally keeping them together for release in a safer pond.  The people in facilities (I won’t reveal their names, but one woman in particular was an enormous help) put their heads together and designed an open-topped cage of fine mesh to be put below the window, so the ducklings would be trapped in it when they jumped. The open top would ensure that mom would fly in to be with her babies.

Here’s the cage. Facilities also wired off the window wells and put down mulch to cushion the babies. (Another shout out to them!)  Note that it covers ground beneath three windows in case some of the ducklings jumped sideways.  I’ve circled the window where the nest was.

A side view:

My job was to check on the nest from the inside every day starting about June 8, looking for signs of hatching (broken eggshells, little heads poking out from beneath Vashti, etc.) That would mean that the ducklings would come down the next day. And that would give me time to warn Facilities of the imminent jump, who in turn would alert the volunteers at Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, who have expertise in capturing ducklings and mothers (they can often get both), who could then be transported to safety.

Well, on June 9 there was no sign of hatching that I could see. It turned out that I missed it.  For the next day, on June 10, I came down to the pond at 6:30 a.m. and there was a ruckus.  I heard a  lot of quacking, and both ducks from the aggressive pair were standing on the pond edge in front of the cage: And, sure enough, Vashti and her brood (I counted six or seven) were inside in the cage, with Vashti running back and forth and quacking, desperate to get to the water—water that would mean death.

Caged Vashti and babies:

I quickly called both CBCM and Facilities, and CBCM dispatched two volunteers to the pond to try to get both the brood and Vashti. In the meantime, I sat across the pond to ensure that the aggressive ducks didn’t somehow get into the cage and wreak havoc.

I noticed, however, that three ducklings were outside the cage.  I didn’t know how that happened, for it was extremely well designed to seal off the area.  One of the ducklings, however, was trapped in the mesh, with his tiny head and wings inside  and its butt and little legs on the outside.  Perhaps they got out through the mesh when Vashti was in the pond.  It took me about ten minutes to free the trapped one, holding its wings against the body while gently manipulating its legs and butt so I could gradually ease it into the pen. (The two loose ones were easily grabbed as they were desperate to stay close to mom.) That done, all the ducklings were then penned up with mom.

The cage had done its job.  But could the whole group be rescued, keeping the family together?  That would be a tough one, for though the CBCM people are experts, a perturbed wild mallard hen is very difficult to capture.

The CBCM people came at 8 a.m.: two young women with nets. I had prepared a “duck box”: a small cardboard box lined with my old but clean tee-shirts to cushion the babies for transport. (I have no idea how they were going to carry the mom, as all they had with them were nets.)

At any rate, the CBCM people were very patient, boxed a few ducklings, and left a couple in the pen so their peeping would attract Vashti. (She few off, of course, when they came near the pen, but stayed nearby.) Then they patiently waited, one on either side of the pen, hoping to net Mom when she was either inside the pen or beside it.

This volunteer is holding two ducklings in her hands:

Patiently waiting to see if Vashti could be gotten:

In the end, they made several game tries. The woman on the right even tried approaching the net from in the water!  (Unfortunately, she slipped and went under.).  But despite patient waiting punctuated with sudden approaches and swinging of nets, Vashti got away. In the meantime I had gone back to my office as I couldn’t deal with the anxiety.  When I came outside half an hour later, the ducklings and volunteers were gone: they had apparently taken all seven ducklings in my rescue box. But Vashti was still there, swimming around the pond and quacking forlornly. It broke my heart, for she had lost her second brood. I tried to feed her, but she would not eat.

That was the outcome.  Although it did a number on me, in the end I think the outcome was good given that my decision to put this in motion was based solely on the desire to save the lives of the babies. There were three possible outcomes:

a.) The ducklings and Vashti all could be allowed to get into the pond.  They would last only a day there before they were driven off by other mallards, and all the babies would die.

b.) Vashti and her brood would all be captured and released together in a distant pond. That sounded like the best outcome, and indeed would be if the aim was to let the family live their lives in nature.

c.) The brood could be captured but not Vashti. The ducklings would then be taken to a rehab facility where, I’m told, survivorship is over 90%.

What happened was “c”, of course.  It could not be helped, and we avoided the deadly outcome of a).  I am trying to tell myself that c.) is in one way better than b.), since ducklings in the wild, even with their mothers, have a very low survival rate. Grok tells me that mallard hens that survive to adulthood can live 5-10 years, having a clutch size averaging 8-9 eggs.  If we assume that a wild hen has a reproductive life of 7 years, with 8 eggs per year, then she will produce about 56 babies in her lifetime.  If the population of ducks is stable, only two of those babies will survive to keep the population stable, replacing the mother and father.  That gives an estimate of mortality in the wild of about 96%—much higher than the 10% in rehab. (Our mortality for ducklings that breed in the pond is in line with that.)

So perhaps more lives were saved with option c, the one that transpired.  Or so I tell myself.  Balanced against that is whatever heartbreak Vashti feels at losing a brood, and I have no doubt that she feels some sense of unfulfillment and even, perhaps, whatever sadness a duck is capable of feeling. Vashti and Armon are no longer in the pond: the only residents is the pair of Mean Ducks.  I have started feeding them; I didn’t before as I wanted them to leave, but I see no point in now punishing ducks now for having acted like ducks.  I am hoping that Vashti will return and things will settle down, and I have given up hope that ducklings will live and grow to maturity in Botany Pond this year.

We could not predict that the invading ducks would be aggressive. But that’s small consolation for having a pond without ducklings this summer.