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Sam Kahn, an editor at Persuasion, has written a piece taking issue with the claim that wokeness is on the way out—that we’ve passed “peak woke”.  I though we had, given the increasing frequency of stories in the MSM that questioned the “received wisdom” of progressive authoritarianism, like this 2022 piece from the NYT (it did, by the way, encounter strong pushback from the paper’s staff).

And we all know that DEI programs are being dismantled in both the academic and corporate world.  So I was hopeful that “wokeness”—by which I mean “progressive and performative authoritarianism that does little to improve society but inflates the reputation of the promoter”—was on its way out. This was buttressed by an article in The Economist which used graphs (see below) to show a decline in wokeness.

Click below to read Kahn’s piece (Michelle Goldberg of the NYT also made this claim about “peak wokeness” going away):

Kahn takes issue with the “wokeness-is-declining” conclusion on two grounds. First, he argues that wokeness is so deeply entrenched in mainstream institutions that we barely notice it any more. Second, he argues that the statistics presented in The Economist article are misleading: they may show a small decline in indices of wokeness in the past couple of years, but no long-term trend.  I find his argument pretty convincing, especially the main example he uses to demonstrate his thesis. Click below to read:

Kahn’s example of his thesis is the infamous interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS journalist Tony Dokoupil. Coates has just published a book containing three essays, one of which is a 100-page anti-Israel screed based on a mere ten days that Coates spent in “Palestine,” by which he means both Israel and the West Bank.  I will be reading that, but the book hasn’t arrived at the library yet. However, Dokoupil’s questions, the scathing review of the book by Coleman Hughes, along with other reports, are indicate a one-sided accusation of Israel. The fact that Coates doesn’t even mention Hamas or the terrorism inflicted on Israel is a telling sign that his essay is misleading, as is the praise for it.

The sign for Kahn that we haven’t reached peak woke is the fact that Dokoupil was called on the carpet by CBS officials simply for asking civil but hard questions of Coates (see the video here). The problem, as everyone knows but only a few will admit, is that Dokoupil challenged some dubious conclusions and observations of a black American icon. That is simply beyond today’s journalistic pale, and that’s why Kahn sees wokeness as deeply embedded in the media. Had Coates been white rather than black, the pushback on Dokoupil would have been far less intense. Race mattered.

Kahn:

My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever.

. . . What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”

All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”

The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.

Regardless of what Coates said in his book, and I will be checking it, you don’t treat a journalist like this for asking hard questions.  That is what we expect journalists to do when they interrogate someone having strong opinions on contentious issues. The fact that CBS would give Dokoupil a verbal spanking (and later refuse to admit that Jerusalem is in Israel), shows that they have “structural wokeism.”

As for the Economist‘s statistics, it is true that they shows rise in indices of wokeness until 2020, but then a tiny decline in the subsequent three years. It may mean something, but it may not. Here are three graphs given by Persuasion and taken from The Economist:

As The Economist notes:

. . ., . we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since.

Yes, but it’s not much of a fall: a small drop in one year and a tiny rise in 2023:

A plot of those who think that inequities are due to discrimination, again showing just a slight drop after 2021.  No statistics are given so we don’t know if the figures are significantly different, but at any rate the drop is tiny.

And woke terms in social-science papers. Again, a smallish dip between 2022 and 2023.

None of this is convinces me that wokeness is decreasing. You’d need a longer-term analysis to show that. The Economist article also gives data on the censuring of academics, mentioning DEI on earnings calls, and DEI jobs in big companies, all showing declines between 2021 or 2022 and 2023.  And the first two declines look significant, but again we’d like long-term data. It may be that DEI as an institution is on the way out, but is still embedded in academia in non-obvious ways (I think this is the case for my university). I have no idea what to make of the “earnings calls” mentions.

Perhaps Kahn is right: wokeness has so thoroughly imbued America that we no longer notice it. Teachers are inhibited from saying certain things in the classroom; the NYT and Washington Post are still biased in their news coverage towards progressive issues, and identiarianism—a sure sign of wokeness—is still with us.  Perhaps wokeness has just become hidden so much that we no longer see it as wokeness.  But I’ll give Kahn the last word (feel free to tendewr your opinion below):

A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.

It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.

I can’t help adding that the wokeness evinced by asserting that Israel is a demonic, apartheid-ridden, and settler-colonialist state—a “progressive” view evinced by Ta-Nehisi Coates—has certainly not declined over the last year. It began on October 7 and has ramped up ever since.

h/t: Ginger K.

 

For the first time ever, SpaceX has followed through on a Starship test launch by bringing back the Super Heavy booster for an on-target catch in the arms of its “Mechazilla” launch-tower cradle in Texas.

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice said.

Today’s successful catch marks a giant step toward using — and reusing — Starship for missions ranging from satellite deployments to NASA’s moon missions to migrations to Mars.

The amazing catch took place minutes after Super Heavy lofted Starship’s second stage, known as Ship, into space for the launch system’s fifth test flight. Liftoff occurred at 7:25 a.m. CT (1225 UTC) at SpaceX’s Starbase on the South Texas coast.

Although the primary objective of the test was to have Ship survive atmospheric re-entry and splash down intact in the Indian Ocean, the Super Heavy booster was the star of the show.

Super Heavy is too massive to set down on landing legs, as is the case for SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. Perfecting the Mechazilla catch is an essential part of SpaceX’s strategy for Starship rocket reusability.

The feat required pinpoint accuracy during the booster’s autonomous descent back through the atmosphere. It had to position itself precisely between Mechazilla’s adjustable arms, also known as “chopsticks,” and hover while the mechanism was engaged to secure the rocket.

“Even in this day and age, what we just saw, that looks like magic,” launch commentator Dan Huot said after the booster shut down its engines and came to rest, hanging on its launch tower.

Today’s test of Starship, which is the world’s most powerful rocket, proceeded according to plan from launch to splashdown. All 33 of the booster’s methane-fueled Raptor engines fired up for launch, and 13 of the Raptors powered the Super Heavy’s return to the pad.

The second stage continued at orbital speeds, on a suborbital test trajectory that rose as high as 200 kilometers (124 miles). An hour after launch, Ship restarted three of its own Raptor engines and made an autonomous descent to its target splashdown point in the Indian Ocean.

During SpaceX’s fourth Starship test flight in June, the Ship sustained damage on the way down but survived for a splashdown. Ship’s thermal protection system was beefed up for today’s test.

Video views of the rocket’s flaps, sent down to Earth via SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, showed heat building up on the control surfaces. Sparks flew off during the descent, but eventually the flaps cooled off — bringing rounds of applause from SpaceX employees who were watching the feed.

Minutes later, the rocket’s video stream showed Ship making a vertical dive into the water, and then a different stream from a nearby buoy showed Ship blazing as it floated on the surface.

“What an incredible end to Starship’s journey,” Tice said.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk hailed the results in a posting to his X social-media platform: “Ship landed precisely on target!” he wrote. “Second of the two objectives achieved.”

Data from the test flight will be used to fine-tune the launch system for future tests, using Starship hardware that has been stacked up at Starbase. Eventually, SpaceX aims to make the entire system fully reusable.

“We just caught a booster,” Huot said. “We’re going to start real soon looking at when we can catch a Ship.”

Starship could be used to accelerate the deployment of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and perhaps to provide point-to-point travel between terrestrial destinations as well.

NASA is depending on SpaceX to provide a modified version of Starship that would serve as the lander for crewed Artemis missions, beginning as soon as 2026. “As we prepare to go back to the moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead — including to the South Pole region of the moon and then on to Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a congratulatory message posted to X.

SpaceX plans to use Starship for missions to Mars — starting with uncrewed trips that could get off the ground by as early as 2026, and continuing with crewed flights that could bring permanent residents to the Red Planet. Musk reportedly envisions building a city on Mars by the 2040s — and Starship is the key to his quest.

“Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” Musk wrote on X.

The post SpaceX’s Mechazilla Catches a Starship Booster on First Try appeared first on Universe Today.

Thanks to the readers who answered my appeal for photos, I now have at least a week’s worth. But please keep them coming in!

Today is Sunday, ergo we have a batch of photos by biologist John Avise; this is the second part of a four-part series on the birds of Hawaii (part 1 is here). John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Birds in Hawaii, Part 2 

Today we continue our photographic montage of native and introduced birds that might be seen on a natural-history tour of the Hawaiian Islands.

O’ahu ‘Elepaio (Chasiempis ibidis) in the hand of a bird-bander (this species is endemic to the Hawaiian Islands):

Erckels spurfowl (Pternistis erckelii) (native to Africa):

Great Frigatebird female (Fregata minor) (native to Hawaii and many other locales in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans):

Hawaiian Coot (Fulica alai) (endemic to the Hawaiian Islands), dark morph:

Hawaiian Coot, light morph (the color morph refers to the color of the frontal shield):

Hawaiian Duck (Anas wyvilliana) (a non-migratory endemic to the large island of Hawaii):

Hawaiian Goose, or Nene (Branta sandvicensis) (an endemic to the Hawaiian Islands, and the official state bird):

House Finch (Haemorhous mexicanus)(native to North America), male:

House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), male (native to Europe and Asia but introduced to many other parts of the world):

Japanese White-eye (Zosterops japonicus) (native to East Asia):

Java Sparrow (Lonchura oryzivora) (native to Indonesia):

Laysan Albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) (native to the Hawaiian islands):

Laysan Albatross flying:

Laysan Albatross chick:

JAC:  Note that the Laysan albatross, in the form of one female bird named Wisdom, is the oldest confirmed living wild bird in the world. She was first tagged in 1950s and is still alive, now about 72 or 73 years old. She has gone through a couple of mates and produced at least 30-36 chick, including at least one grandchick. I love her.

In 2012, astronomers detected a gas giant transiting in front of WASP-49A, a G-type star located about 635 light-years from Earth. The data obtained by the WASP survey indicated that this exoplanet (WASP-49 b) is a gas giant roughly the same size as Jupiter and 37% as massive. In 2017, WASP-49 b was found to have an extensive cloud of sodium, which was confounding to scientists. Further observations in 2019 using the Hubble Space Telescope detected the presence of other minerals, including magnesium and iron, which appeared to be magnetically bound to the gas giant.

WASP-49 b and its star are predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium, with only trace amounts of sodium – not enough to account for this cloud. In addition, there was no indication of how this sodium cloud was ejected into space. In our Solar System, gas emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io create a similar phenomenon. In a recent study, an international team led by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found potential evidence of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting WASP-49 b. While not yet confirmed, the presence of a volcanic exomoon around this gas giant could explain the presence of this sodium cloud.

The study was led by Apurva Oza, a former postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and now a staff scientist at Caltech. He was joined by colleagues from NASA JPL and researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, the Caltech/IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and multiple universities. The paper that details their findings was recently published in The Astrophysical Letters.

Io is the most volcanic body in our Solar System, with hundreds of active volcanoes and extensive lava formations. This activity is the result of tidal interaction with Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, which causes the interior of Io to flex and contract, creating dense lava flows that break through the surface. These volcanoes spew lava up to 300 km (186 mi) into space, along with sulfur dioxide, sodium, potassium, and other gases, creating a massive cloud around Jupiter up to 1,000 times the planet’s radius.

While the team’s observations did not detect any exomoons directly around WASP-49 b, a massive sodium cloud could constitute indirect evidence of a volcanic moon that is simply too small and dim to detect. For years, Oza has investigated how exomoons might be detected via their volcanic activity. To determine if this was the case around WASP-49 b, he and the team observed WASP-49 b over time using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) on the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

This proved quite challenging because of the distance involved and the way the star, planet, and cloud often overlap, making it very difficult to distinguish between them. Nevertheless, their observations revealed several pieces of evidence that suggest that a separate body is responsible for the sodium cloud. For example, their observations indicated that the cloud suddenly increased in size during two observations, suggesting it was being replenished. In fact, they estimate that the cloud is replenished at a rate of 100,000 kg (220,000 lbs) per second.

They also observed the cloud moving faster than the planet, suggesting it was generated by another body orbiting faster than the planet. “We think this is a really critical piece of evidence,” said Oza. “The cloud is moving in the opposite direction that physics tells us it should be going if it were part of the planet’s atmosphere.” Their observations also noted something interesting as WASP-49 b orbited its parent star every 2.8 days. During this time, the cloud appeared and disappeared behind the star or the planet irregularly.

This artist’s concept depicts a potential volcanic moon between the exoplanet WASP-49 b, left, and its parent star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To address this, the team also used a computer model to simulate the presence of an exomoon and compare it to their observations. Their results showed that an exomoon with an orbital period of eight hours could explain the cloud’s motion and activity, including how it appeared to pass in front of the planet and will disappear and reappear at intervals. Another takeaway from this study was what it suggests about this possible exomoon’s future.

If WASP-49 b is similar in size to Earth’s Moon, Oza and his colleagues estimate that the tidal interaction with the planet’s gravity and its rapid mass loss will eventually cause it to disintegrate. “If there really is a moon there, it will have a very destructive ending,” said Oza. While these observations are intriguing, the team emphasizes that follow-up observations are needed to learn more about the cloud’s orbit and structure.

Further Reading: NASA, The Astrophysical Letters

The post A Possible Exomoon Could be Volcanic, like Jupiter’s Moon Io appeared first on Universe Today.

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Situating her analyses within the broader intellectual landscape, First Amendment scholar and philosopher Tara Smith takes up the views of such historical figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, while also addressing contemporary clashes over issues ranging from speech on social media, “cancel culture,” and the implications of “religious exemptions” to the crucial difference between speech and action and the very vocabulary in which we discuss these issues, dissecting the exact meanings of “censorship” and “freedom.”

Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1989. A specialist in moral, legal, and political philosophy, she is author of the books Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006), Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield 1995). Smith’s scholarly articles span such subjects as rights conflicts, the morality of money, everyday justice, forgiveness, friendship, pride, moral perfection, and the value of spectator sports.

Shermer and Smith discuss:

• What is freedom?
• What are rights?
• How are rights and freedoms won or lost?
• Private vs. government restrictions on speech
• Social media, tech companies, and censorship
• speech and expression
• Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
• Speech – Action distinction and where the lines between speech and conduct are blurry
• Hate speech = violence?
• Is Twitter a platform or a publisher?
• Is Facebook an information service or a telecommunications company?
• Incitement to violence and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection
• Libel and slander
• Self-censorship
• Free expression as speech (flag burning, Madonna’s videos, etc.)
• Corporate controls on speech
• Compelled speech
• How Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the clear and present danger test, which would become an important test under First Amendment law over the coming decades.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

If you don’t know who Chappell Roan is, she’s a singer/songwriter who recently became famous; you can read about here.  She identifies as queer and as a drag queen, even though she’s apparently a biological woman.

In this video, Bill Maher addresses an open letter to her. Roan has touted the virtues of open-mindedness, which Maher admires, but according to him she seems to get all her history from Tik Tok and is apparently sympathetic to Palestine and Hamas and sees Israel as a “colonizer”. Maher proceeds to give her a history lecture couched in Generation Z jargon. As he tells her, “you have it completely ass-backwards as to who is doing the oppressing” (of Palestinians).

This is more serious than most of Maher’s “comedy” videos, but he’s passionate about the subject.

It’s been quiet at the University of Chicago—too quiet!  We almost got through Students for Justice in Palestine’s “week of rage” without nary a megaphone blaring or any graffiti painted on campus walls and sidewalks. But, as I predicted, this was not to last. With Hamas losing the war with Israel, and all universities refusing to divest their endowment from any Israel-related companies, the protestors were bound to get even more enraged than last year.

They’re already back at it at Columbia University, and yesterday afternoon the terrorism-lovers struck our campus again. One of their targets was a famous Henry Moore sculpture on campus called “Nuclear Energy.” It sits on the site of the world’s first nuclear reactor, built by Fermi and his colleagues underneath the old Stagg Field, an athletic field. Wikipedia gives the themes of this work:

Moore cited a number of inspirations for the sculpture, from earlier works with similar forms to natural objects like stones. About the shape of the sculpture, Moore said:

When I had made this working model I showed it to them and they liked my idea because the top of it is like some large mushroom, or a kind of mushroom cloud. Also it has a kind of head shape like the top of the skull but down below is more an architectural cathedral. One might think of the lower part of it being a protective form and constructed for human beings and the top being more like the idea of the destructive side of the atom. So between the two it might express to people in a symbolic way the whole event. (Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 1973, p.286)

Moore’s work explores the hopes and fears of the Atomic Age. The potential of controlled nuclear power or a nuclear holocaust is tied to the historical events of the site with the iconography of a mushroom cloud or skull, supported by pillars topped by arches like a protective cathedral. Interviews with Moore highlight the dual nature of the top and bottom portions of the sculpture, meant to represent the creative and destructive power possible with nuclear energy. An abstract sculpture was chosen by the University to highlight the importance of the events at the site, and their implications for humanity, rather than the importance of Fermi in bringing them about.

Curiously, this campus attraction draws a lot of Japanese tourists, who visit it by the busload, competing to have their picture taken in front of the mushroom cloud.

But yesterday, the enraged activists covered it with red paint and then spray-painted “FREE GAZA” on the sidewalk beside it. Here’s a picture taken by a member of the University community, who sent it to me.  What on earth do the protestors think they are accomplishing by doing this? They sure aren’t enlisting sympathy. They are simply acting out, like the petulant toddlers they are.

The person who took the photo sent it to me along with this email (all words and photos are used with permission):

I just came back to work to find this (see attached). It is probably a very good thing that I was not around a few minutes ago. The protestors are now one block down and I cannot see any signs of arrests having been made, regardless of heavy UC and City police presence. About one hundred and fifty children of privilege, calling the UC Police “the KKK’. To their face—with most officers present being black. We are dealing with imbeciles of a species the world has never seen before. Every single student involved in the desecration of this monument needs to be expelled, ipso facto. The whole lot.

Another member of the University community weighed in, and sent some photographs as well:

Today at about 3pm, pro-Palestine protesters forcefully attempted to lock the University gate on 57th Street with chains and padlocks. Two brave UChicago police officers fought back and were able to prevent that. Police cars joined the scene shortly afterwards. I was about to walk through the gate when this happened.

Actually, according to the news report below, they protestors did lock the gate.

Below: the photos (captions are mine). The protestors put their signs on Hull Gate, which is right outside my building, and then tried to lock the gate so their signs would be visible and conspicuous (see more below):

Both campus cops and Chicago city police were on the site. Here two campus cops try to prevent the protestors from locking the gate, the main entry from the north to the Quad:

Note that many of the protestors are masked. That is not for health reasons, but because they are cowards, fearful of being identified because they might be punished. Many are also wearing keffiyehs, sometimes described as “swastikas for hipsters”.

Whoops—there’s a coward inside the gate:

Masks everywhere. I can’t tell you how reprehensible I find acts of civil disobedience that are not only not peaceful, but whose perps try to disguise themselves:

The outside. Whoops, we have an identifiable human here:

More from outside the gate. My building is to the left, and the Anatomy building, housing Organismal Biology and Anatomy, is to the right:

University of Chicago cops on the scene:

The student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, did a live-stream report on the protests that is now a full news report. There were student scuffles with cops, three arrests, and reports that police used batons and pepper spray. Here are a few indented excerpts from the news, with my words flush left.

A UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) rally saw three protesters arrested and physical altercations between protesters and officers. Earlier, protesters locked Cobb Gate using a bike lock despite UCPD’s efforts to keep the gate open. During the rally multiple police officers used pepper spray and batons. Protesters damaged UCPD vehicles and kicked at least one officer.

The rally, which began with a walk out at 2:30 p.m., morphed into a brawl that involved at least 200 University- and community-affiliated protesters, 20 University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers, and 30 Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers.

Deans-on-Call informed UCPD at approximately 2:15 p.m., that the University had “zero tolerance” for excessive noise before attempting to hand out warning cards to protest leaders using bullhorns to lead chants on the quad at 2:45 p.m. The cards read, “FINAL WARNING: This card serves to inform you or your student organization that your conduct is violating policies outlined in the Student Manual.” The cards also contained four QR codes linked to relevant University policies, which were updated in advance of the beginning of the academic year. Protesters refused to accept the cards.

The Deans-on-Call have always been useless in these altercations. From the lack of punishments last year, the protestors know that “zero tolerance” really means “infinite tolerance.”

. . . At approximately 3 p.m., protesters marched from the center of the quad and proceeded through the Hull and Cobb Gates on the north end. Once all protesters had passed through Cobb Gate, protesters pushed the gate closed and secured it with a bike lock despite police attempts to stop them. They also hung a banner on the gate that read “Free Palestine” and “Hands Off Lebanon.”

By this point, the protest had grown to include over 150 people, spilling out onto East 57th Street. Protesters allowed space for cars to pass through, but UCPD patrol cars blocked the street on both ends.

Protesters told police officers “Pigs go home” and chanted “Intifada, intifada, long live the intifada.”

The “intifada” is an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israel. The protestors want that, and doubtless many of them are proud of the butchery of October 7.

At 3:15 p.m., protesters left Cobb Gate and proceeded north on S. Ellis Avenue. They stopped in front of the Nuclear Energy Sculpture next to the Regenstein Library, at which point some protesters threw paint on the statue and wrote graffiti in the surrounding area that read “Free Gaza,” “hands off Lebonan” [sic], and “fuck the bombs.” CPD officers arrived on scene, joining at least 20 UCPD officers. Some were in riot gear and carried batons and zip-ties.

At approximately 3:30 p.m., the protest moved further north along the street, stopping between Ratner Athletics Center and the Court Theater. Police searched for and then tackled and detained one protester, whom they put into a patrol car. Protesters attempted to prevent the detainment, physically confronting officers. The Maroon was unable to confirm why that protester was detained.

Other protesters began chanting “Let him go!” and surrounded the patrol car that held the detained protester. An officer attempted to drive the UCPD patrol car away from the scene but was blocked by the crowd of protesters. Officers and protesters continued to push against each other.

Another protester struck the side mirror of a separate police car several times with what appeared to be a rock and then rejoined the crowd.

As tensions escalated, a third protester kicked a CPD officer in the back of his leg. Officers attempted to detain the protester, hitting him with a baton. They chased him briefly and tackled him halfway down the block, at which point they detained him and placed him into a patrol car.

The attack on cops takes the protest out of the realm of civil disobedience, which is supposed to be peaceful protests. And of course rule #1 of that type of demonstration is NEVER HIT A COP.

Officers used pepper spray on protesters, who were seen afterward rubbing and washing their eyes with water. One student told the Maroon that he was pepper sprayed by an officer who had “harassed students at the encampment.” A Maroon reporter witnessed a UCPD officer inadvertently pepper spraying a Chicago Police Department Captain, an incident which the UCPD officer later apologized for.

I don’t know about the pepper spray, but I saw the encampment taken down, at least the beginning of it, and I saw no harassment of students by the University police.

At approximately 3:45 p.m., protesters began dispersing north along South Ellis Avenue, south towards the quad, and through the SMART Museum courtyard. One CPD officer remarked to gathered officers, “that was fun for a little while.” Shortly after, CPD and UCPD officers also dispersed. By 4 p.m., the lock on Cobb Gate was removed and the gate was reopened.

And of course the mess around the sculpture, involving painted vandalism, had to be cleaned up by workers from Facilities. The protestors don’t care that workers have clean up after them.

The University issued a statement (below) that seems to me a bit ambiguous. Yes, university policiers prohibit disruptive violations and destruction of property, but what will happen if (as happened during the last academic year) the arrested protestors have their charges dropped by the Chicago district attorney, who seems sympathetic to the protests?  Here’s the statement:

According to a University spokesperson, “the University of Chicago is fundamentally committed to upholding the rights of protesters to express their views on any issue. At the same time, University policies make it clear that protests cannot jeopardize public safety, disrupt the University’s operations, or involve the destruction of property.”

This year, I hope, the University will actually enforce violations of the law and of university regulations. As far as I know, despite arrests and dismantling of the encampment last academic year, in the end not a single student was punished. Last spring I recounted four protests by Students for Justice in Palestine and their umbrella organization, UChicago United, and yet though all of these constituted legal or university violations, not a single student was punished. 13 of them had their degrees withheld, but they all got them reinstated after a short while. And though a sit-in in the admissions office led to the arrest for criminal trespassing of 28 people by Chicago Police (18 undergraduates, eight graduate students, and two professors), all the charges were dropped.

As far as I know—and there may be proceedings of which I’m unaware—the only punishment meted out the entire academic year was a mild rebuke to Students for Justice in Palestine–just a note on their record that if they continue to violate university regulations, there may be trouble for them in the future.

Frankly, I’m tired of the University proclaiming that violations will be punished, but then doing nothing about it. I don’t want to live through another year with protestors illegally shouting through megaphones during class hours, spraying graffiti on University walls, and holding sit-ins in University buildings.  Many of us feel that the University, despite eventually dismantling the illegal encampment, is doing as little as it can to punish protestors—perhaps because they don’t want the attention. But if this kind of mishigas continues, it will eventually lead to more attention focused on the University of Chicago, and perhaps, as has happened at Harvard, a decline in the number of Jewish students applying for admission.

Dumbest Thing of the Week: Loch Ness Sonar; News Items: Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, and Physics, Fruit Fly Connectome, Shroud of Turin Again; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Hydrogen Cars; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

If you find cat-related material, send it along (one reader already does).

From Cosmos we see that scientists have developed new ways to give brain scans to cats, which of course don’t want to wear electrodes on their head.  Click headline to read:

Cosmos caption: Fée, an abandoned cat with chronic osteoarthritis, was one of 11 who went through the knitted cap tests at Université de Montréal’s veterinary school. Credit: Aliénor Delsart / Université de Montréal

An excerpt:

Knitted wool caps are a good way to give cats brain scans, according to a new study.

Cats tend to chew off wires and electrodes in electroencephalograms (EEGs), which means that they need to be sedated to get a scan.

This hinders vets’ abilities to assess chronic pain from conditions like osteoarthritis.

But a Canadian research team, publishing in Journal of Neuroscience Methods, has developed a less invasive method.

The team’s solution is a hand-knitted cap, embedded with ten gold-plated electrodes.

“The knitted hat helped to keep the electrodes in place during the evaluation and prevented cats to try to play with or chew the wire,” the team writes in their paper.

They used this cap to take EEG scans of 11 cats, assessing each cat’s response to stressful and soothing stimuli, like scented oils and coloured lights.

“One cat was able to shake its head and to remove the electrodes. In this case, we stopped the procedure, re-placed the electrodes, and resumed recording,” write the researchers.

“The entire procedure lasted around 45 min per cat, including positive reinforcement (treats and petting) between the sensory exposure.”

A cat styling the knitted cap and electrodes. Credit: Delsart et al., 2024, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110254

The team was able to collect EEG data from all cats, and analysed 4 in detail.

They’re now looking for funding to perform more scans, “to enable us to establish a genuine EEG signature for chronic pain, and many other applications that will enable us to automate chronic pain detection in the future,” according to co-lead researcher Professor Éric Troncy, a researcher at the Université de Montréal.

Here’s are some EEGs from scanned moggies:

Graphs recorded from feline subjects. Credit: Delsart et al., 2024, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110254

 

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Here we have my favorite genre of YouTube video: an animal rescue, and particularly cat rescues. This cat must have fallen or climbed onto the pipes, and then jumps into the water to escape. The soggy moggy was rescued by a nice man with a net, though the rescue wasn’t straightforward. The man wields the net with great dexterity, and finally snags it. This reminds me of how I rescued some ducks with a net (though I was actually in the water). I hope the cat found a good home.

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Maybe if Marxism was explained by a cat, we’d understand it better. Here’s a 2+-minute short explanation of Marxism using cats. The YouTube notes:

There is nothing the internet loves more than cats. So here is a very brief introduction to Marxism, explained by Bosley.

There is also a book that helps teach kitties about Marxism: Marx for Cats.

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Lagniappe:  A cat rescue story; click to read. Toilet water! Click to read the Telegram article:

The piece:

When stray pets are left to wander under the Texas summer sun for days and weeks on end, it could lead to a death sentence. But one cat in the Lone Star State proved his will to survive by finding at least some refuge.

When Edd was discovered by Houston SPCA investigators, he was living in a closed-down tanning salon, living off toilet water with no food in sight, the shelter said in an Aug. 27 Facebook post. He was also underweight and skittish.

“Shoppers and fellow business owners said they could see him in the window,” Julie Kuenstle with the Houston SPCA told McClatchy News. “It’s estimated that Edd was inside the closed store for around a month but survived on the water in the toilet.”

Now, weeks later, Edd is ready to start a new chapter of his life — his now-healthy life.

The SPCA ad for Edd is below.  There’s a happy ending, as the article says,

Kuenstle told McClatchy News that it didn’t take long for someone to offer Edd a forever home — he was adopted at the end of September.

 

h/t: Barry, Ginger K., Michael

Systems that can harvest water from moisture in the atmosphere could offer a valuable water source in the wake of disasters

A new technique enables makers to finely tune the color, shade, and texture of 3D-printed objects using only one material. The method is faster and uses less material than other approaches.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge.

Scientists have used light to visualize magnetic domains, and manipulated these regions using an electric field, in a quantum antiferromagnet. This method allows real-time observation of magnetic behaviors, paving the way for advancements in next-generation electronics and memory devices, as well as a deeper understanding of quantum materials.

Scientists have used light to visualize magnetic domains, and manipulated these regions using an electric field, in a quantum antiferromagnet. This method allows real-time observation of magnetic behaviors, paving the way for advancements in next-generation electronics and memory devices, as well as a deeper understanding of quantum materials.

Researchers have successfully develop single-atom editing technology that maximizes drug efficacy.

A collection-based survey of lichen species at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, USA and Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada was conducted as part of the Mars-160 mission, a simulation of Martian surface exploration. The survey identified 48 lichen taxa, with 35 species from the Utah site and 13 species from the Canadian site.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the 'inside-out' growth of a galaxy in the early universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Researchers devised a way to expand tissue 20-fold in a single step. Their simple, inexpensive method could pave the way for nearly any biology lab to perform nanoscale imaging.

Sometimes, we try to capture a QR code with a good digital camera on a smartphone, but the reading eventually fails. This usually happens when the QR code itself is of poor image quality, or if it has been printed on surfaces that are not flat -- deformed or with irregularities of unknown pattern -- such as the wrapping of a courier package or a tray of prepared food. Now, a team has designed a methodology that facilitates the recognition of QR codes in these physical environments where reading is more complicated.