Why Evolution is True Feed

When I visited Peru with a girlfriend many years ago, I traveled to Nazca, in the western desert, to see the famous Nazca lines, a series of large and mysterious geoglyphs that Wikipedia describes this way:

They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed.  There are two major phases of the Nazca lines, Paracas phase, from 400 to 200 BC, and Nazca phase, from 200 BC to 500 AD. In the 21st century, several hundred new figures have been found with the use of drones, and archaeologists believe that there are more to be found.

Most lines run straight across the landscape, but there are also figurative designs of animals and plants. The combined length of all the lines is more than 1,300 km (800 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 km2 (19 sq mi). The lines are typically 10 to 15 cm (4–6 in) deep. They were made by removing the top layer of reddish-brown ferric oxide–coated pebbles to reveal a yellow-grey subsoil.The width of the lines varies considerably, but more than half are slightly more than 33 cm (13 in) wide. In some places they may be only 30 cm (12 in) wide, and in others reach 1.8 m (6 ft) wide.

We hired a small plane for a pittance—about 30 bucks‚—to fly us over the lines, the only way to see them.  They can be properly viewed only from above, which makes them all the more mysterious. There are many theories about their significance, including some who assert that they were made by those extraterrestrials who stubbornly refuse to make their presence known.  The location of the lines is shown on the map below from Wikipedia:

From Shuttle radar topography mission, Wikimedia Commons

They are still finding these lines, which have been effaces by time and by humans roaming around. Now, as the Guardian reveals (click on screenshot to read), a huge cat-shaped Nazca line has been found.Click below to read:

An excerpt:

The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.

The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BC and 100BC, emerged during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.

A Unesco world heritage site since 1994, the Nazca Lines, which are made up of hundreds of geometric and zoomorphic images, were created by removing rocks and earth to reveal the contrasting materials below. They lie 250 miles (400km) south of Lima and cover about 450 sq km (175 sq miles) of Peru’s arid coastal plain.

. . .“The figure was scarcely visible and was about to disappear because it’s situated on quite a steep slope that’s prone to the effects of natural erosion,” Peru’s culture ministry said in a statement this week.

“Over the past week, the geoglyph was cleaned and conserved, and shows a feline figure in profile, with its head facing the front.” It said the cat was 37 metres long, with well-defined lines that varied in width between 30cm and 40cm.

. . .“Over the past few years, the use of drones has allowed us to take images of hillsides.”

Isla said between 80 and 100 new figures had emerged over recent years in the Nazca and Palpa valleys, all of which predated the Nazca culture (AD200-700). “These are smaller in size, drawn on to hillsides, and clearly belong to an earlier tradition.”

The archaeologist said the cat had been put out during the late Paracas era, which ran from 500BC to AD200. “We know that from comparing iconographies,” said Isla. “Paracas textiles, for example, show birds, cats and people that are easily comparable to these geoglyphs.”

Enough palaver. Here is the cat:

From Facebook’s Cat Overlords site:

The geoglyph was restored to its original condition; it was presumably made between 200-100 BC.

Here’s a four-minute video also showing the feline.  I’m not sure what it is. It’s surely not a house cat, but, asking Grok, I got this:

[It] most likely represents the Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita, also known as the Andean mountain cat). That species is a denizen of the mountains, not this area, and is now highly endangered. It’s the size of a large house cat. Here’s a four-minute video about the discovery:

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

Here’s another Guardian article (click to read) about Japan’s cat obsession, and how capitalists have parlayed it into a lot of yen. Click to read (and go to the article, where there are lots of photos).

An excerpt:

Feline features stare out from the covers of umpteen novels, they have an officially designated day devoted to their mystique and popularity, and have outnumbered dogs as pets for a decade.

The influence of cats is evident across every corner of Japanese society, with a recent report crediting them with generating an expected ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy this year – a phenomenon dubbed “catnomics”.

The power of the paw is especially evident in one retro neighbourhood of Tokyo, where on a recent afternoon North American, Australian and European visitors milled around the capital’s self-proclaimed “cat town”.

“There have always been cats in Yanaka because there are lots of Buddhist temples here,” says Yumiko Yamashita, owner of several cats and of the Neco Action store. “In the old days they roamed around and even went into different houses, but they’re less visible these days. They prefer to stay indoors on a hot day like this.”

The global boom in Japanese literature has turned the cat into a marketing juggernaut, more than a century after Natsume Sōseki wrote one of the country’s best-known novels, I Am a Cat, told from the point of view of a household cat.

Cats figure prominently in the surrealist novels of Haruki Murakami, and in dozens of other works, notably Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles and Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat. Publishers have even exploited feline marketing power to create covers for books that have little or no connection to the animal.

. . . In a nation of pet lovers – where domesticated dogs and cats outnumber children aged under 15, Japanese households kept 8.8 million cats in 2025, compared with 6.8 million dogs, according to a survey by the Japan Pet Food Association. The average cat-owning household, the survey said, spends almost ¥1.8m ($11,300) over the course of their moggy’s life.

It is that level of devotion that makes cats big business. In his most recent report on “catnomics”, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, estimates that animals will add just under ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy in 2026.

Combining estimates of consumer spending at cat cafes and on items such as photo books with sales and salaries among cat food manufacturers and related companies, Miyamoto noted that the estimate fell just short of beating the economic impact of the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka.

He added, though, that cats were still generating “a comparable economic effect, demonstrating the significant contribution cats are making to the Japanese economy”.

High-profile cat owners in Japan include the emperor and empress, and the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has expressed a preference for cats over dogs.

Here’s a short Indian video (in English) about Japan’s cat obsession:

But this is a better video; it’s 52 minutes long but very amusing and informative (the stuff about the maneki-neko figures is great):

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

From IHeartCats, we hear about an American cat named Effie whose favorite food is mashed potatoes—potatoes that must contain the right amount of butter. Click below to read:

An excerpt:

Some pets become gentler with age, while others grow wonderfully stubborn about the things they love most. Effie, an adorable senior tabby with soft gray and white fur, has reached a point in life where she refuses to settle for anything less than exactly what she wants at mealtime. Her favorite comfort food happens to be mashed potatoes, but there is one very important condition. The potatoes must contain the perfect amount of butter. If they do not meet her standards, Effie will loudly let her family know she is disappointed until her dinner is prepared properly.

The lovable moment was shared on TikTok by @kateisaac25, where viewers quickly fell in love with the gray-and-white senior cat and her very specific dinner standards. According to the caption, Effie will loudly complain if her spoonful of mashed potatoes is missing the right amount of butter.

It is hard not to smile at the sight of her happily digging into the creamy meal with complete satisfaction. Sitting comfortably at the table, Effie looks like a tiny grandmother enjoying her favorite comfort food after a long day.

Her owner explained that the butter ratio is extremely important to Effie. If there is not enough melted goodness mixed into the potatoes, the senior cat wastes no time voicing her disappointment. The little demands have become part of her daily routine, and honestly, everyone in the house seems happy to spoil her.

. . .Effie’s strong opinions at dinnertime show just how comfortable and loved she feels in her home.

Her soft fur, relaxed posture, and determined little meows tell the story of a cat who knows she is safe. She has likely spent years building trust with her family, and now she confidently expects her meals to be prepared exactly the way she likes them.

The video captures more than just a funny moment. It highlights the special bond people share with aging pets. Small routines like preparing a favorite snack or responding to a familiar meow become treasured parts of everyday life.

. . . Viewers online could not get enough of Effie’s adorable behavior. Many related to her love of buttery comfort food, while others joked that she had earned the right to be demanding after so many years.

And here’s the TikTok video mentioned above (also here).  Effie just gets a spoonful of mashed potatoes, but oy, is there butter!:

@kateisaac25

#onthisday

♬ original sound – Katelyn Claire Isaac

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

Lagniappe: a new song by Kiffness:

h/t: Loretta

Did you spot the elk calf in Matthew Hill’s photo this morning? Here it is!

When I asked Matthew how, in the tagging process, he found the hidden calves, he replied:

Typically the cow has a vaginal insert transmitter that comes out when the calf drops, which allows us to pinpoint the birth location. Several hours later the cow and calf move a short distance off the birth location where the calf conceals itself. Say, within 50-500 m. When we arrive, the cow leaves the area but will come back within 4-5 hrs. We systematically survey the area looking for it. Really hard game of hide and seek!

Example of an “activated” vaginal insert transmitter (“vit”) recovered at birth location.

More photos from the tagging process:

 

More: a wolf attacked another calf, but mom apparently drove it off. Matthew:

I’ve attached pics from yesterday of a five day old calf that survived a wolf attack only hrs before we arrived. Very lucky calf.  It must have been a single wolf, and the cow was able to fend it off. If two or more wolves, the cow would have bailed to live to breed another day.

Reader Matthew Hill sent some photos taken during his tagging of elk calves (Cervus canadensis), and one of them qualifies as a “spot the. . . ” photo.  Can you spot the elk calf, hiding from predators inconspicuously?  The reveal will be at 10:30 Chicago time, along with other photos from Matthew’s endeavor. His words are indented:

I’m currently involved in tagging elk calves in northern Wisconsin. I thought one of today’s tags might be a fun one for an I spy post. Not super difficult.  It’s a two-day- old female.

Can you spot it?  You can tell us in the comments if you did, but please don’t say where it was. Again, reveal is at 10:30 a.m.  Click the photo to enlarge it.

 

The Jesus and Mo artist tells us that this strip is “a Friday flashback from 13 years ago today”.  The boys abhor homosexuality, but are obsessed with it (remember, they share a bed):

. . . is dire. It is in fact so dire that although I have movies and photos of Vashti and of the last hen and her brood of nine, I am not mentally prepared to put them up, as they evoke bad memories and deep sadness. (As you may recall, both broods left the pond, almost certainly because they were harassed by drakes.) Vashti came back and re-nested in her old nest (!); she’s now sitting on a brood of seven eggs. The second hen, who was never named, has also returned but hasn’t (yet) nested, but is accompanied by an aggressive drake.

I have been keeping a careful eye on what is going on in the pond, and I’m quite worried about Vashti, whose brood is set to hatch within two weeks. Once a day I call her down to the pond for a feeding and a bath. She stays for about 15 minutes, gobbling up a big meal, preening for a while, and then quickly flying back to her nest to incubate the eggs. But over the past week or so, the damn drakes have been chasing her when they see her, driving her out of the pond, quacking and hiding nearby. It is only with considerable effort that I can get her away from the drakes so she can eat and go back to her nest. Note that the drakes aren’t trying to attack her; they want to mate with her. And she doesn’t want to mate!

What this means is that when she finally comes down with ducklings, she and her brood will be mercilessly harassed, just like the last hen and her brood. And that means that in all likelihood they will flee the pond, which means certain death for the ducklings.

I thus have a hard choice: let them come to the pond and take their chances, or arrange for the brood (and mother, if all possible) to be captured and either taken to a distant body of water or to a wildlife rehab facility.  The first alternative is unpalatable, as it involves the death of the entire brood, but I think it’s likely if I don’t intervene. Lately I have been moving towards to the second alternative:  letting Facilities and the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors take over and recover everyone if they can. Getting the ducklings is relatively easy, though they’ll be in the water very quickly after they jump. But getting Mom is a job for pros, as she can fly away.

My priority is to save lives, not entertain the University community with the sight of ducklings—ducklings who won’t last on the Pond more than a day or two.

It’s always been a great joy for me to help rear the babies up to fledging, but compared to the loss of lives, that is a selfish attitude. I think I will go by the words of Maimonides, “If you save one life, it is as if you saved the world entire.”  To me that means that I could save an entire life for each duckling rescued. It’s a hard decision and a sad one, but if the goal is to save lives, the strategy is clear.

The good news is that all five turtles put in the pond last fall survived the winter. Here they are sunning on a rock yesterday. There are four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider—two subspecies of a single species.

 

Reader Mark Joseph, inspired by my post on leucistic Australian ducks, went in an example and some other photos. Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Your post this morning coincidentally arrived as did this photo from a person in our birdwatching group; it’s a leucistic house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus):

And, to give you a small set instead of a singleton, here are a couple of my feeble efforts, all taken with an iPhone in suburban southwestern Michigan. Hopefully, you can use them. I know even less about flowers and insects than I do about birds, so all identifications are courtesy of Gemini.

A zinnia (This specific variety is likely a Zinnia elegans, such as the ‘Canary Bird’ or ‘Benary’s Giant Yellow’ cultivar”) with a bumblebee (“specifically consistent with the Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens). I have enjoyed taking photos of flowers and insects together:

Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stoebe, sometimes classified as Centaurea maculosa). Unfortunately, it is invasive:

A crabapple tree and a closeup.  This closeup helps narrow it down to a Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata).

Sargent Crabapple (Malus sargentii) or a Siberian Crabapple (Malus baccata):

This is a Big Brown Bat (Eptesicus fuscus) or a Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifugus).These two species look nearly identical from a distance and are the two most common bats found roosting on residential brick walls across North America.

Brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha halys).When we first moved here and I decided to take some pictures, I got all excited because I was able to get a really good picture. Then I found out it was a stink bug, and invasive to boot. So, not a new species of peacock. But, it’s one of the things evolution has produced. Order Hemiptera, the “true bugs.”

A Shaggy Inkcap (Coprinus comatus), commonly known as a Shaggy Mane or Lawyer’s Wig. The next day the cap is just black goo, and the day after, nothing is left but the stem:

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “butt2,” is, as the caption say, “A resurrection from 2006 – Ganesh’s debut appearance in the strip.”

And it has a pretty bad pun!

Last night on the NBC News (and also on the same station the night before) I heard a report on a new cancer drug touted as being almost miraculous. The drug was called daraxonrasib, was described as working by blocking a mutated promoter of tumor growth in people with metastatic pancreatic cancer—a notoriously fatal disease (the median survival period after diagnosis of this stage is about 3-6 months, and the five-year survival rate is 3.2%).  But the news confused survival time with survival rate, saying something like “the drug doubles the survival rate. . . .from 6 months to 13.2 months”. (I may have gotten the figures wrong as I’m working from memory.)  I knew that something was wrong, as metastatic pancreatic cancer is almost always fatal, so the survival rate, which the percentage of people still alive after a specified period of time (often five years), cannot be expressed in months. 

Sure enough, this mistake, expressing the effects as a doubling of survival rate, was not only misleading, but widespread.  It’s easy to find similar errors in the press; just google the drug name and “survival rate”:

From CBS News (click all screenshots to read):

An excerpt (all excerpts are indented). I’ve put the confusing bits in bold:

A new, experimental medication nearly doubled overall survival rates for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, according to the results of a study published Sunday.

Researchers say the findings are a significant marker of progress toward treating a notoriously deadly type of cancer, for which there have historically been limited effective options for therapies.

The drug is called daraxonrasib and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases — a target that had eluded treatment for decades.

“While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward,” said Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study.

The research team found that taking the medication, as a daily pill, reduced the risk of death by 60% for patients with metastatic, or spreading, pancreatic cancer who had previously received treatment. That was compared with survival rates of patients receiving standard chemotherapy, according to UCLA Health.

It randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Sunday at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

Those taking daraxonrasib lived for a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for chemotherapy recipients. While that may seem like a small improvement, Wainberg said it marked the first drug to show a substantial advantage over chemotherapy.

 Note that while CBS says that it reduces the risk of death by 60%, there are NO DATA showing that. The risk of death is again nearly 100%, though survival time increases by a bit more than two. Also, “survival rates” have not been doubled. There are no data on that, at least not in the article. 

From USA Today:

Excerpt:

An experimental drug nearly doubled the overall survival rates of pancreatic cancer patients, according to the results of its latest clinical trial.

The drug, daraxonrasib, targets the gene mutation behind most pancreatic cancer diagnoses.

In the phase 3, randomized trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 31, researchers found patients who received the drug lived a median of 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for those who received chemotherapy.

They use “rate” but give “times.”

It’s easy to find similar conflations. This one, less excusable because of the venue, is from The Clinical Trial Vanguard:

They give the results correctly but characterize them as showing “death risk”:

A 60% reduction in the risk of death—HR 0.40—in previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer is not a number the oncology community has seen before, in any phase 3 trial, in any line of therapy. That is the threshold RASolute 302 crossed. Revolution Medicines enrolled 500 patients, randomized them between once-daily oral daraxonrasib and investigator’s choice of standard cytotoxic chemotherapy, and watched median overall survival reach 13.2 months on the experimental arm versus 6.6 months on chemotherapy in the RAS G12 mutant population. Doubling median OS in second-line pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a disease where incremental gains have defined ambition for decades, reframes what the endpoint space for this indication even looks like.

Nope; the chance of dying within a year or two remains about the same, I’d guess.

. . . and a post from someone on Facebook (I won’t give a name), touting a “60% reduction in the risk of death”. That’s wrong: the risk of death is probably still about 100%

The BBC gets it right, however:

This is correct:

A pill has been found to almost double the survival time for advanced pancreatic cancer patients, with experts describing the trial as a game changer.

The drug, called daraxonrasib, appears to be a breakthrough in managing a disease that has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers.

It helps prevent the spread of cancer by locking onto and shutting off the mutated KRAS gene, which is in more than 90% of pancreatic tumours and spurs cancer growth.

The trial, which included 500 patients in North America, Europe, and Asia, found the average survival time for patients on chemotherapy was 6.6 months, compared with 13.2 months for patients on daraxonrasib. It also caused fewer side-effects.

One other point: if “death risk” is meant to say “death risk over the course of the study,” then that might be accurate. But then the journalists must clarify it.

There are two points to be made, and they’re obvious. First, more than a few science/medicine journalists, including some writing on medical websites, don’t understand statistics, mistaking “rate” for “time”.  I asked a science-friendly doctor if this mistake is common, and he replied, “All the time. Sometimes, I’m not sure it’s an unintentional mistake.”

Which leads us to the second point: this kind of conflation could provide false hope for cancer patients and their families. Knowing that you will live, on average, 6½ months longer if you take the new drug is a very different thing from knowing that you will still die with near certainty. It’s easy for one to think—and this is what I thought when I heard the teaser on television—that the drug will reduce the chance of dying by half.  Seriously, journalists, please brush up on your statistics, for this one is not rocket science!

There’s a dearth of news, or should I say there’s a dearth of news that I want to write about: the interesting news is relevated to the morning Hili post.  But since it’s June 1, which marks for me the Day to Begin Wearing Hawaiian shirts, I present my garb for today. I have about 50 Hawaiian shirts, acquired when I went through an aloha-shirt phase, but I wear them only in appropriat weather. This one is semi-authentic, as it’s not old but has coconut buttons and a pocket matched with the shirt’s pattern—two features of an authentic Hawaiian shirt. (The real old ones from decades ago are made of rayon, not cotton.  I got it from a now-defunct outfit that had gorgeous Hawaiian shirts: “Paradise on a Hanger” (great name). Sadly, it is not longer in business, but i have enough shirts.

This one has a lovely green-and-orange fish pattern. I wish that mainland Americans would take up this habit, for you see them all over the islands of Hawaii, especially on “aloha Fridays.” It counts as “business casual” garb, too. You can hardly be unhappy when all around you are colorful shirts.

And Matthew sent this short YouTube video about a new puggle (the name for a baby platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus) from ZoosVictoria, which really does seem to be interested in conservation. Note that the incubation for the egg is just ten days, but it’s four months until it emerges from the den. It’s okay to hold females, but remember that males have poison spurs on their hind legs, which can inflict a painful and slow-healing wound.

From PCC(E):  After watching the explosion of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket last week, a rocket that is designed to help create the first human colony on the Moon, I thought to myself, “What is all this mishigass? Why do we need a human colony on the Moon? What will it tell us that unmanned exploration using drones or robotic vehicles won’t?” I couldn’t think of any answers, but I beefed about this to my friend (and reader) Jim “Bat” Batterson, who used to work for NASA.  I was surprised that he pretty much agreed with me, and wrote an email to that effect. I asked him if he could turn the email into a short post, and he gladly assented.  So here’s Bat’s take on space missions (indented):

Before Trump’s election and, really, its Project 2025 budgetary guidance, NASA spent roughly equal amounts on “human spaceflight” (also called “human exploration”) and “science”. In the NASA budget, “science” is a category that includes basic/fundamental science —mostly via grants to universities and institutes in the sub-areas of planetary science, like heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth/atmospheric science.  The areas within “science” are prioritized by “decadal” committees of experts who, every ten years, assess the possible knowledge that NASA could help create.  These needs can be very expensive, requiring the engineering of entirely new spacecraft and instrumentation needing long timelines and large teams of unique technical expertise (think space telescopes, planetary landers, comet or asteroid fly-bys). 

Human Exploration, on the other hand, deals with all endeavors in which humans go into space in rockets, capsules, and space stations.  The Mars Rover, for example, counts as “Science” and not “Human Exploration” because humans aren’t involved. 

Until this past year. Human Exploration and Science were each budgeted at about $8 billion yearly with an additional $3 billion in human spaceflight operations such as running the International Space Station.

Last year, the administration’s (i.e., the President’s) budget recommended cutting Science by about 50%(!), and raising Human Exploration by $1 billion. Congress rejected that and kept the budget as it was.  The same attempt to cut the budget was made this year, and Congress again rejected it.

The lunar moon base or colony, as well as the Mars colonization form of mental masturbation, both fit under the exploration and human spaceflight operations budget. Space telescopes, robotic missions to the planets and asteroids, earth-observing satellites and the like are generally counted in the “Science” portion of NASA’s budget.  Even if Congress again restores the full Science budget, the chaos and uncertainty brought on these multi-year efforts can easily erode NASA if talented engineers and scientists seek more stable work to support their families.

I fully agree that there is no “science” in human colonization of the Moon as opposed to using robotic rovers; and the addition of humans to the mix entails not only danger to human lives, but much extra expense.  The significant science that comes out of human exploration of space is limited to understanding the complexities of humans living and working in space. The only justification I see for a lunar base is the same as that given for the “first man in space” competition with Russia in the 1960’s:  the claim of “soft” military/international presence IF another country such as China plants their flag along with a human colony.  Adjusted for inflation, the NASA budget of the early 1960’s was three times that of today’s budgets, reflecting the more serious devotion to putting humans on the Moon in the Sixties.  You can see a good budget summary from planetary society at this link.  

By the way, using Department-of-Defense comparisons, I like to think in terms of how many aircraft0-carrier-equivalents aspects of the NASA budget represent. A new aircraft carrier these days costs around $13 billion +/- out the door.  So the cost of the of NASA Human Exploration program is on the order of a new aircraft carrier each year.

So, dear readers, both Bat and I agree that we’re wasting a lot of dough (our dough) trying to put human colonies on the Moon and on Mars. It is a performative gesture with no real scientific benefits, and only tiny and unforseeable military benefits.  That money could well be used to alleviate human problems right here on Earth.

If you have any questions about this, put them in the comments and Bat will be glad to answer them.

Here from Wikipedia is a “NASA concept art of an envisioned lunar mining facility” and, below that, an “Inflatable module for lunar base”.

NASA/SAIC/Pat Rawlings, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons NASA, Kitmacher, Ciccora artists, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Today we have pictures from the shore of New Jersey taken by Jan Malik.  Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are a few pictures from my walks on Cape May and Sandy Hook, taken this April.

Starting from the Atlantic Ocean (eastern) shore on Cape May, I met this pair of American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus). In Cape May, a section of the beach is fenced off to protect nesting sites for them and for Piping plovers. They are feisty birds and every spring there is a competition for nesting sites; the bird on the right is calling at another Oystercatcher:

The pair took off to drive out the intruder:

The place where I found that pair was littered with the remains of Sand fleas (possibly Emerita talpoida). These fossorial crustaceans normally stay buried in the sand, exiting only when the sand is awash with the shallow tide, but Oystercatchers’ bills are well adapted to dig them out. I think the birds ate only the soft and juicy parts of their telsons, leaving the crustaceans mortally wounded and unable to move:

These Sand fleas are small and difficult to catch alive. That’s what their front end and first pair of legs look like. These crabs dig backwards, starting from their telson, and the front pair of legs is used as a sand anchor:

Another arthropod – the Horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), came ashore, atypically for it, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula. These are treacherous waters for these spiderlike creatures, for they are easily flipped over by ocean waves and become stranded. They are an interesting part of the Delaware Bay ecosystem and I may share more pictures of them later:

On the Delaware Bay shore of Cape May, there were already many Laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), which mostly move south in winter but return to their breeding grounds in the spring. They are quite similar to the Eurasian Black-headed gull:

Terns also made their appearance. I think this may be a Forster’s tern (Sterna forsteri) because of the lack of black tips on its primaries and its pure white underbelly, but they are difficult to tell apart from Common terns (Sterna hirundo):

The terns landed on old quay pilings and started courting. There’s no way to tell females from males other than by their courting behavior; males can be slightly larger, but the difference is less than 5%, which is hardly discernible to the human eye:

The courting consists of the two mates trying to look “smug”, with wings drooped, necks extended, and bills pointed toward the sky:

Then there’s the courtship dance and ritual feeding. Here is a fragment of it, taken from a large distance, so I’ve compensated for the lack of pixels by cobbling together this composite. The male presents a fry to the female and then, if she accepts (which is not a given), circles around the female while stomping his feet:

On my way home, I stopped at Sandy Hook, a sand spit where shore gun batteries protecting New York Harbor were once located. It is now a prime nesting site for Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus):

The former Army garrison required many houses for the officers, and these are now excellent nesting sites for Ospreys. Standing in the center of Officers Row (as the area is called), I counted four nests on top of chimneys:

The meadow below the houses was full of American robins (Turdus migratorius) fattening up for the nesting season by preying on earthworms. I know little about annelids, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it is the common earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris), since it is a favorite prey for robins:

Finally, moving to the class Mammalia, here are Sandy Hook’s harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), congregating on rocks exposed by low tide (the tide was rising so, one by one, the seals were forced to slip back into the water). There are eight seals in this picture, but I counted 15 in total. Their population around the New York inlet has increased in recent years, which may soon put them on a collision course with the fishing industry:

I have only three horrible words today, but I saw them all this week, and I want to get them off my chest before they tangle up my kishkes. Here they are, with examples.  Two of them appear in just one article—at the New York Times.

1.) Tradwife: This word seems to have appeared recently, and is a shortening of “traditional wife”—that is, as AI sees it, “It refers to a woman who chooses to embrace traditional gender roles, centering her life around being a homemaker, raising children, and submitting to her husband’s role as the primary.”  It’s an example of how the young people shorten phrases in order to look cool.  I had to look it up the first time I saw it, but that’s the case for many odious neologisms.

2.) Cosplay. This has been around for a longish while, and yet I still don’t know whether to pronounce it with a short or a long “o”. And you’ll never hear me using it.  But no matter, as it will never pass my lipes.

Again, here’s an AI definition:

Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume” and “play.” It is a performance art and hobby where participants wear costumes and accessories to represent a specific character from a work of fiction, such as anime, comic books, video games, or movies. In other words, it’s Halloween for adults.

Here are both of them used in a single piece from the NYT written by Lauren Jackson in her weekly column “Believing,” designed to tell the paper’s readers how wonderful religion is (Jackson claims to be a nonbeliever, but her lips are firmly affixecd to the posterior of faith).

The book “Yesteryear” has a fantastic, pithy pitch: A tradwife influencer named Natalie wakes up in the world she was cosplaying online, in the year 1855. It’s a thriller and a scathing critique of how women perform for the internet. It’s also a book all about religion, belief — and delusion.

It’s at the top of the Times best-seller list, and I bet it will hang out there for a while. Before it even came out, Anne Hathaway decided she’d adapt it into a movie.

I loved every page. So I called the author, Caro Claire Burke, to talk to her about it.

Both words in one sentence! Jackson thinks this kind of writing is au courant.  Seriously, Jackson should jettison her breezy prose, which I guess is designed to lure sheep into the fold.

And my Worst Word of the Year:

3.) Bougie.  I think this one is pronounced “boo-szhee”, and is a shortening of “bourgeois,” often used derisively to mock wealth and status.  Here’s its usage in the Free Press by Suzy Weiss, the younger sister of Bari Weiss who was nepotistically given a slot as a writer for the FP. She hasn’t yet grown into her role:

Everyone who moves to the bougie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope does so with big ideas about how their new life there will go. How they’re going to jog in Prospect Park; how their brownstone apartments will be an oasis in the concrete jungle, a place to read on-trend books and host delightful dinner parties for erudite neighbors.

Isn’t that so cool?  She uses “bougie”. (I won’t go after “on-trend”, which is ridiculous; why not use “trendy”?) I can’t bear to go on. . .

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West.  He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.

I first saw a lot of Gauguins at the famous Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit in 2004, which displayed more than 150 of the painter’s works. I was mesmerized, not only by the colors and exoticism, but by narrative works like “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (see below).

Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:

Gauguin’s grave. Attribution: makemake, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year.  You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows  a photo of the painter.  It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly.  Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.

One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.

Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.

Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris.  He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France.  They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel.  After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:

Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

via Wikimedia Commons And Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh as “The Painter of Sunflowers.”  Gauguin really did love and admire van Gogh, but couldn’t tolerate his eccentricities and periods of lunacy; yet for the rest of his life he would sometimes paint a sunflower in honor of his friend, even in Polynesia, where Gauguin planted some (van Gogh committed suicide two years after Gauguin fled Arles). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book.  Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.

Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.

Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maternity, 1899:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death.  There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right. 

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Public Domain, CCo, Wikimedia Commons

Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:

As you see, it’s laudatory.  One excerpt from the review:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. . .

. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)

But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.

“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”

Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”

Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing.  And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.

We have a short RWP today as there are more posts to come.  First we hear from Robert Lang, who sees a surprising amount of wildlife near his home in the eastern LA “suburb” of Altadena. Robert’s intro is indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

Although every day sees another few housing starts in post-fire Altadena, it’s still mostly empty of people, but after a year that included plenty of rain, the vacant lots are lush with plants—a mix of native coastal sage scrub, invasive weeds, and landscaping gone wild. This temporary rewilding provides plenty of cover for the local wildlife to come down out of the hills and hang out. Yesterday the workers at our site reported that a bear had stopped by and done a walk-through of the framed house (fortunately, just lookie-looing, no damage). Today I did a short hike on the Gabrielino Trail above my old stomping ground of JPL and saw a different (younger) California black bear (Ursus americanus californiensis) just off the trail, and I shot the photo below. . .

. . .  also this video.

This isn’t the bear species on the California state flag, which is the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); that was native to this area but was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, 28 “problem bears”, California black bears, were taken from Yosemite and released in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. The black bear species is highly variable in coloration, ranging from black through brown, blond, and even white (the so-called “spirit bears” of British Columbia). Most of the bears we see in Altadena are brown, like this youngster, all descended from the original Problematic Twenty-Eight.

JAC: Here’s the California state flag sporting a grizzly:

Original: Donald Graeme Kelley. Vectorization: Devin Cook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s the latest opinion/comedy bit from Friday’s Real Time show with Bill Maher, with the episode called “Let’s be frank.”  Maher starts out by citing the recent Democratic Party Autopsy (here) about why the party lost the Presidency and Congress in 2024. But he then faults both parties for having politicians in office who won’t be honest (surprise!).

Honesty, he avers, can be found only in books politicians write after they have left office. Maher gives several examples, including Republicans who admit, after they leave office, that Trump is paying off the January 6 insurrectionists with a “slush fund.” And don’t forget, he adds, Eisenhower’s warning about the “military industrial complex,” issued just three days before he left office.

The key diagnosis, Maher says, was made by the late Barney Frank when he was in hospice. It’s cited in the Times of Israel:

“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable,

Maher says, “And there, in one sentence, is the autopsy the Democrats have been so desperately searching for.”  True! And of course this explains the capitalized “Frank” in the title.

The theme, then, is that Democrats say the truth about the party only when they have nothing to lose for speaking up.

Finally, Maher notes that some red states are better than his own “progressive” state—California—in education and in green energy.  The last bit: “Democrats: these are your issues: education, race, the environment. And I say this with love: you’re losing to the Waffle House car-on-the-lawn states.”  Well, we’ll see how the Democrats do in this fall’s midterms, though the most crucial election is in 2028.

The guests for this episode were astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, MS Now news correspondent Katy Tur, and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Tyson is not shown in this segment.

I don’t wholeheartedly embrace AI, for I think it will be the death of liberal education.  In both the humanities and science, I fear that students will lose any ability they have to write, and will not improve their writing because they’ll be using bots.  This will degrade their ability to communicate. (Scientists too need to communicate, and if they rely solely on bots, which can write papers for them, they’ll also degrade their ability to think.)  Take-home assignments will vanish (AI can do them, and are doing them now), and all that’s left are in-class verbal participation and in-class exams.  This is fine for students who just think of college as a way to purchase accreditation and not a chance to glory in the joys of learning, but so be it.

However, AI is good for some things, including analyzing data, doing statistics, doing preliminary literature searches, and, in the article from the WSJ screenshot below, solving difficult math problems.  The article shows that a problem posed by the famous and eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös—the “unit distance problem” has been solved by AI. Open AI, which created the program that did it, describes it this way—but it’s not that simple:

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place nn points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?

This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.

The “distance 1” thing confused me, and Wikipedia explains it a different way:

A problem posed by Paul Erdős known as the unit distance problem asks for the maximum possible number of unit-distance pairs determined by n points in the Euclidean plane; equivalently, it asks for the maximum number of edges in a unit distance graph on n vertices.

It gives a figure described as “a unit distance graph with 16 vertices and 40 edges”.

By David Eppstein – Own work, CC0/

Wikipedia describes such unit distance graphs this way:

“In mathematics, particularly geometric graph theory, a unit distance graph is a graph formed from a collection of points in the Euclidean plane by connecting two points whenever the distance between them is exactly one.”

That’s what is confusing me, for if the theorem deals only with points in a two-dimensional plane, why aren’t unconnected dots not joined that are closer than some connected dots? (Look at the four dots around the center of the graph above. None of them are connected to each other, though more distant one are.)  I presume some math-savvy reader will enlighten us.

Anyway, Open AI and the WSJ tells us that the problem has been solved by AI. If you want to see the solutions, open AI says this:

The proof is available here ⁠(opens in a new window). The companion paper by leading external mathematicians is available here⁠ (opens in a new window). You can find an abridged version of the model’s chain of thought here⁠ (opens in a new window).

But the WSJ gives more comprehensible details.  Click screenshot to read (if you subscribe):

An excerpt:

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.”

And you’ll definitely need to sit down if you’re not a mathematician.

Because a famous math problem that stumped humans for the better part of a century has finally been toppled—by AI.

Not long ago, the most advanced AI models couldn’t do basic math. By last year, they were performing at gold-medal levels at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Now they are solving classic problems in combinatorial geometry using algebraic number theory. In no time at all, artificial intelligence has gone from stupid to frighteningly smart.

But even mathematicians were astonished when OpenAI announced that one of its models resolved a puzzle known as the unit distance problem without the help of any humans scribbling a bunch of equations on chalkboards.

It was fed this prompt:

And produced this proof, giving the maximum number of unit-distance pairs:

Apparently the proof was accepted by mathematicians.  More from the WSJ:

And everyone in math lost their minds.

For those who aren’t fluent in numbers, OpenAI helped translate its findings by presenting them alongside 19 pages of companion remarks from prominent mathematicians.

. . .Just looking at formulas is enough to hurt my brain, but I wanted to know more about what the AI found, how we humans missed it—and why this breakthrough matters to those of us who would like to permanently distance ourselves from math problems.

When I spoke with OpenAI employees, they told me this result would have sounded completely bananas one year ago.

“Forget one year ago,” researcher Sebastien Bubeck said. “A month ago.”

There are endorsements by mathematicians, and a history of the problem, which Erdös considered quite difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that he offered what was then a pretty hefty sum for anybody who could solve it: $500. I think the money will be given to the OpenAI team.

OpenAI’s researchers were stunned. They had given this Erdős problem to an internal model as a test of its capabilities—to find out whether it was better than previous models. They found out how much better it was once they took a peek at the solution. “I initially didn’t believe it,” said Mehtaab Sawhney, a Columbia mathematician at OpenAI. So they searched for errors, verified the results with outsiders and checked the AI’s work using the company’s AI coding agent. “With enough reading and enough Codexing,” Sawhney said, “it seemed believable—and pretty remarkable.”

Long before AI, mathematicians who solved Erdős problems often framed their checks instead of cashing them. For them, the money was worth less than the glory. When I asked OpenAI researchers about their plans for the prize, they hadn’t given it much thought.

But they did have lots of thoughts about my next question: Why did AI succeed where humans failed?

The first explanation is that this particular solution happens to be highly counterintuitive.

Most people who tackled this problem tried to prove Erdős’s conjecture, rather than disprove it. Only by defying conventional wisdom and experimenting with seemingly improbable strategies did the model find an unexpected path forward.

The second is that humans specialize while AI synthesizes.

While mathematicians tend to focus on their specific areas of expertise, AI models use their vast knowledge to spot connections that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves. In this case, that meant pulling from both algebraic number theory and discrete geometry, which have about as much in common as the marathon and pole vault.

The third explanation is that AI has time, attention, patience, focus and the persistence to stick with methods that humans might abandon—and the solution to this Erdős problem demanded it.

“It’s the kind of idea that you try for a bit, it doesn’t work, and you think maybe you were just too hopeful,” said Mark Sellke, a Harvard statistician at OpenAI. “So you give up and move on.”

AI doesn’t move on. It keeps plugging away without taking breaks to eat, sleep, answer emails, pick the kids up from school and watch the Knicks.

And it can think coherently for so long that even an abridged version of the model’s “chain of thought” ran more than 75,000 words—the length of the first “Harry Potter” book.

Was it an elegant proof? Well, the article implies “no,” but it’s apparently a proof:

“It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen yet the spark of genius that you could attribute to some of the grandest proofs in the history of humanity,” Bubeck told me.

And how long did the computation take? Less than a day and a half:

After reading it, a former OpenAI researcher did some back-of-the-envelope math and estimated it took less than 32 hours and $1,000 in tokens, a bargain for a result of this caliber. The researchers wouldn’t confirm the exact amount of time and compute, but Bubeck described the costs as “really nothing crazy at all.”

At any rate, this is what AI is good for, and I wonder if, say, it could solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, which took Andrew Wiles eight years of work to solve (he was knighted for it).  And I wonder if there are any seemingly intractable math problems that can’t be solved by AI, especially if they were or will be solved by humans.

Now I don’t think there are any practical implications of this results, but that’s true of much mathematical theory. I’m just amazed at what AI can do.

From People magazine (also at the UPI), we hear about a brave moggy whjo chased off a coyote.  Click on the screenshot to read:

An excerpt:

A Pico Rivera, California, resident captured some surprising footage: a cat fighting off a coyote in the middle of the day.

“I was in shock,” Debbie Beltran, the cat’s owner, told KTLA-TV, after viewing the video. “It took me a while to see—is that our cat or somebody else’s? And no, it’s our cat.”

Beltran said she was at work on May 1 when a neighbor sent security camera footage of her cat ferociously fighting a coyote outside. The video shows the cat standing its ground outside the family’s yard on Manzanar Avenue before it climbs a tree and escapes the coyote.

“Coyotes usually come out when the sun goes down,” Beltran said. “So to see this happen in broad daylight, that was shocking.”

Beltran said her cat, named Mama, has been with her family for about 5 years and is believed to be about 10 years old. She notes that Mama has always been a courageous cat who doesn’t back down from a fight.

“She’s always been feisty, this type of cat, and has got into fights before, so it doesn’t surprise me,” the pet parent told KABC.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time a coyote has attacked one of Beltran’s pets. She said that last year, one of her cats died in a coyote attack. Now, she’s giving Mama some extra attention since her caught-on-camera battle.

The video is below (turn off the closed captions, as they interfere with seeing the scrap).  Mama is a brave cat: watch at her bristle, hump her back, and chase the d*g! However, cats should really be kept indoors because not all predators are so timorous.

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

From IHeartCats, we here about a high-tech way Dubai has developed to feed street cats. Click headline below to read.

An excerpt with a video below:

As people stroll through Dubai’s carefully maintained parks and busy public spaces, a quieter sign of compassion is beginning to appear beside the city’s modern landscape. New feeding stations for stray animals are being introduced across several locations, giving homeless cats a cleaner and more dependable place to find food and water. For years, many residents relied on leaving bowls wherever they could stop to help, often hoping hungry street cats would discover them in time. Now, Dubai is taking a more organized approach that blends kindness, sanitation, and public care into one thoughtful effort designed to support both animals and the shared spaces around them.

Dubai has launched a pilot program featuring 12 feeding units placed in parks and other public areas. The project is designed to support stray animals while also improving cleanliness and organization in shared spaces. For years, many residents and volunteers have cared for street cats on their own, stopping to leave food and water wherever they could. While compassionate, those efforts often created scattered feeding spots that were difficult to maintain.

Now, the city is taking a more structured approach.

The stations aim to make feeding more consistent and sanitary while helping caretakers provide support in designated locations. It reflects a growing recognition that animal welfare is connected to a city’s overall health and appearance. Instead of treating stray-cat care as an informal act left entirely to volunteers, Dubai is weaving compassion into its public infrastructure.

For the cats wandering through busy streets and quiet parks, the change could mean something deeply important: reliability.

Street animals often survive day by day, never knowing when food or water will appear. Many endure extreme heat, exhaustion, and long stretches of uncertainty. Having fixed feeding stations creates a sense of stability for animals that spend their lives navigating harsh outdoor conditions. Even a simple sheltered feeding spot can offer relief and comfort.

Dubai’s decision also highlights how cities are beginning to rethink the relationship between urban development and animal care. Modern public spaces are usually designed around people first, but this initiative acknowledges that stray animals are part of the environment, too.

The feeding stations are intended to reduce mess and discourage random food waste while still allowing residents to help animals responsibly. By centralizing feeding efforts, the city can better manage sanitation concerns without removing the compassion that inspired people to feed the cats in the first place.

The idea transforms what was once a scattered, individual effort into something shared and supported at a civic level.

Not only that, but the station combines feeding with recycling: if you put a can or bottle into the station, cat food is dispensed into the station. See the video below.  Great idea!

 

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

From The Animal Rescue Site we hear of an unholy interspecific friendship between a cat and a d*g species: “Wild fox befriends cat“, by Malorie Thompson.  Here’s an excerpt, with a video below:

Cats and foxes seem like two of the same, but it’s rare that we see them interact.

They’re both sly and cunning, playful and adorable. Yet, they’re different species and they likely rarely cross paths in a meaningful way.

However, a wildlife photographer managed to capture a sweet exchange between the two animals and you have to see it to believe it.

Turkish wildlife photographer Ali ihsan Öztürk (@aliihsanozturk.65) shared a video of a cat and a fox hanging out on Instagram and it’s really something special.

He captioned the post (translated): “Fox and cat’s friendship. I couldn’t believe even while taking the picture. what a beautiful friendship.”

In the video, you can see the cat come up behind the fox and nuzzle the wild animal. Surprisingly, the fox didn’t seem to mind one bit and took it as an invitation for friendship!

The two animals continued to nuzzle each other in a playful way. It’s easy to see why Ali was so surprised to witness it!

Below is the Facebook post, which you can also see by clicking on the picture. Here’s the entire text:

In January 2026, a story began spreading online that many people could not stop thinking about: two stray animals who soon became known as the “street brothers.”

A fox and a cat had somehow learned to survive together outdoors. They shared warmth, protection, and the feeling of not being alone. Life on the street was hard, but they always stayed close to each other. The fox, a little bigger and stronger, often let the injured cat lie right by his side. On cold nights, it almost seemed as if he was quietly keeping watch so nothing would happen to his small companion.

When rescuers finally brought them to safety, the cat received the medical care it urgently needed. But at the shelter, something became obvious right away: whenever the two were separated, both became visibly stressed. Restlessness, searching, whining — as if the most important support in their lives had suddenly been taken away. Their closeness had long become more than a habit. It was their home.

So the team did everything they could to keep them together. Eventually, their story reached a kindhearted person who did not want a half-solution. He did not adopt only the cat — he took in the fox too, so the two would never be torn apart again.

Their journey is a reminder of what loyalty really means. And that friendship sometimes appears where no one expects it. Family does not always have to be the same species — sometimes it is simply the same bond holding two hearts together.

Fox-and-cat-friends videos are not rare: here are two more. All of these, oddly, feature cats that are mostly white.

*****************’

Lagniappe: From Reese: “Our Michael” from Archaeology & Art on Facebook, featuring an old photograph that was apparently for sale on eBay but that has been sold. Lovely cat!  Here’s the whole text and the dead link:

Oct, 1938: our Micheal [sic]

The love radiating from the phrase “our Michael” alone is enough to warm our hearts.

The photographer and story are unclear. The source of this vintage photo is an old eBay listing, but the link isn’t active:

http://www.ebay.com/…/Antique…/391002853535…

h/t: Michael, Reese

Correction: Colin told me this: “One minor correction: Theory and Society isn’t a new journal. What’s new is the newly approved ‘Peer Review’ paper category they offer. We had been working with the Springer Nature people for close to 6 months back and forth, and finally they approved it and implemented it on the journal website’s backend so it appears in the drop-down menu when people submit articles.

Luana sent me this tweet, which I’d missed, announcing the founding of a new section of a scientific journal that exists to critique articles in other journals (with the original author given the right of reply). Click on the screenshot if you want to go to the original tweet:

 

To see the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Kevin McCaffree and Colin explaining the journal, click on the screenshot below—or you can find the article archived here.

Some excerpts:

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.” But science isn’t like a thermostat regulating your home’s temperature. It’s a human institution run by fallible human beings. Scientists and scholars are susceptible to career incentives, moral fads, groupthink and fear. When those pressures capture journals or entire fields, peer review can become less a filter for error than a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

. . . Decades of studies on publication bias, replication failures and political bias in the social sciences have shown that peer-reviewed papers are often less reliable than the public assumes. John Ioannidis’s famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” remains disturbing because its basic insight about the fallibility of medical research remains true. In fields that rely heavily on narrative or qualitative methods, or that touch on politicized topics (as much social science does), ideology influences which questions are asked and which conclusions are professionally acceptable.

The authors then mention the Sokal hoax as well as the “Grievance Studies affair” involving submission of bogus papers to social-science and humanities journals by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghassian. (There were no submissions to STEM journals in either “affair” unless you consider gender studies journals as being in STEM.

A bit more:

This problem is growing more serious. Across swaths of the humanities, social sciences, medicine and biology, some narratives have become taboo. Papers presenting contrary evidence or dissenting viewpoints are rejected without comment. Letters to the editor, which are supposed to provide a quick way to respond to flawed work, are ignored or unavailable. The result is an ideologically biased literature that’s presented as an expert consensus and cited by journalists, courts, school boards, medical associations, government agencies and lawmakers to justify policies that affect millions of people.

The most obvious answer is better peer review. But ideologically captured fields have little incentive to correct themselves. As a result, objections to progressive orthodoxy are relegated to social-media threads, blog posts and newspaper opinion sections.

This is where the myth of “self-correcting” science becomes a problem. People assume the system will fix itself, but first someone has to notice the problem and create a mechanism for correction.

That is what we have done. As an editor-in-chief and a member of the editorial advisory board of Theory and Society, an interdisciplinary journal published by Springer Nature, we are proud to announce a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.” The purpose is to avoid procedural traps that can prevent legitimate criticism from being published and to recover what peer review was supposed to be: serious, good-faith analysis by experts seeking clarity and truth.

As in postpublication peer review, a Peer Review article may address a paper from any scholarly journal so long as it raises concerns about methods, evidence, logic, definitions or theory. The focus must be on claims, arguments and scholarly standards, not the author’s character or motives.

Submissions, limited to 2,500 words, will undergo a simple merit review rather than endless rounds of gatekeeping. An editor or subject-matter expert will ask a straightforward question: Is this critique coherent, serious and reasonable enough to deserve scholarly attention? If so, it will be accepted.

This is a good idea, and I can easily see myself writing a short response to some pieces that I find deficient. (Some of my website critiques of “sex-is-a-spectrum” posts might have been appropriate.

The only problem is what to do with papers (not just critiques) that try to air subjects that are forbidden or inflammatory.  Those might be suitable for The Journal of Controversial Ideas, but I’ve never seen a straight science/data paper there. (Granted, I haven’t looked at every issue.)

Anyway, pass this news along to those who might be interested.

Are people suffering from a persistent, debilitating, and apparently incurable psychiatric condition, such as incapacitating suicidal depression, entitled to physician and/or government assistance in dying? (This procedure is also called “physician-assisted suicide”, or “medical assistance in dying”: MAID).  Of course anybody can kill themselves without the help of doctors or the government, but I’m talking about formal programs, often involving ingestion or injection of pentobarbital or secobarbital. This is available for those suffering from apparently incurable and suicidal mental illness in five countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Spain (see details below the fold). All of these countries require, as is proper, a rigorous vetting program by mental-health professionals and doctors to see if all recourses have been tried and if the patient truly want to die and sees no point in living.

One alternative, legal everywhere and mentioned in the piece below, is voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSF), which, depending on what you do, will cause death within a week or two.  Some countries, like the Netherlands, will give hospice care to mentally ill people who are not approved for MAID but choose VSF, helping those patients ease out of life when their bodies start to shut down.

While physician-assisted suicide is legal in many places, including 11 states in the U.S., as well as Washington D.C.—laws permitting it have recently passed in Illinois and New York, and will take effect this summer—these are all for people suffering from terminal medical conditions.  The U.S. and all countries other than the five listed above do not allow physician-assisted suicide for other coniditons, whether or not the government assists or helps pay for it.

For a number of reasons I list below, MAID for psychiatric conditions has become quite controversial,  While I tend to side with those who allow it, I also agree that stringent medical and psychological vetting is necessary before a doctor is allowed to help someone die who has such conditions.  In the Free Press article below, author Rupa Subramanya first describes the death of Iris Dekker in the Netherlands, and then discusses the many issues around the procedure.

Click to read, though you’ll have to be a subscriber.

One gets the feeling from the posted article above, which is generally objective, that Subramanya really does oppose MAID for psychiatric conditions, and partly for religious reasons.  In a new hourlong conversation with Coleman Hughes, however, Subramanya pulls no punches; she clearly doesn’t think MAID is ready for primetime.  Coleman is a bit more in favor of it, but also has reservations.

First, a bit about Iris Dekker, who sought MAID in the Netherlands after over a decade of deep depression and suicidality.  She in fact tried to kill herself twice, once by hanging and once by cutting, but her parents found her in both cases and aborted the attempt. She also had a physical condition that may have been related to her mental illness:

Depression was not new to the Dekkers. Omar [Iris’s father] has a history of it, as do other members of his family. But Iris’s was different. Her symptoms were psychological and physical—a condition called functional neurological disorder, associated with severe psychological distress and depression. It often presents with symptoms like paralysis, seizures, and chronic pain, and was once referred to in medical psychology as hysteria. Iris had spent more than two years in a wheelchair after a seizure left her unable to walk.

In the end, after she had tried everything, including electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine treatment, Iris asked for MAID. But she became worse while waiting for approval and so practiced VSF until she died, with her pain palliated by physicians, at age 19.  Her parents didn’t want her to die, but in the end realized that there was no likelihood of a cure, and supported her. The end:

Watching her fade away, Omar felt the full weight of what was happening. He recalled the final night with his daughter as he held her in his arms and listened to her breathing. “In my heart, as a father—and also as a nurse—I was thinking, I have to do something,” he said. “And at the same time, I knew: No. This is what she wants.”

In her final moments, Iris could no longer speak or respond. When she took her last breath, Omar saw a smile on his daughter’s face.

“She looked so happy,” he said. “I couldn’t give her more love than letting her go.” Iris died on March 1, five days before her 20th birthday.

Letting go of those we love is very hard. We take it for granted that it’s humane when we’re dealing with pets who have terminal medical issues, but we cannot know when animals are undergoing unbearable mental suffering. But humans can tell us.

*********

It seems obvious, as I said, that Subramanya doesn’t like the idea of MAID, nor does she say how it could be implemented properly.  Statements like these are what makes me feel that way:

The Dekkers agreed to talk to me in detail about their daughter’s decisions—and theirs. They also showed me medical records for Iris. I tried to understand how loving parents could be persuaded that the best decision for their daughter was an early death. What I found was a system that turns young people’s ambiguous wishes into a diagnosis of incurable depression. The process raises questions about the treatment not only of a few teens like Iris who choose to die by euthanasia, but countless others who are confronted with the idea that their psychological suffering is beyond help.

. . .With each failure, Iris and her parents heard the same conclusion from specialists: Her condition was “treatment resistant,” and doctors had exhausted their options. In fact, the conclusion that depression such as Iris’s can be incurable is itself controversial among psychiatrists. As one recent paper in Psychological Medicine noted, clinicians “cannot accurately predict long-term chances of recovery in a particular patient with treatment-resistant depression.”

In the podcast with Coleman, Rupa makes it clear that while she’s not opposed to assisted dying, she is pretty much opposed to the process when it’s applied to psychiatric illnesses or even, as is legal in Canada, to people who have incurable suffering from a medical condition, like going blind or having diabetes.  I won’t counter her arguments, though I disagree with many of her claims. I just want to list below some of the reasons people oppose MAID for purely psychiatric conditions.  All of these save the first are mentioned in either the article or in the podcast. I have made the list and give my reactions to it.

1.) Religious reason #1: only God can take a life or determine when someone should die, suicide is against religious dictates, etc. I will not deal with this because I don’t believe there are gods and thus don’t think these reasons are worth considering seriously. But they are of course worth countering and discussing. I simply won’t entertain the proposition that “God knows best.”

2.) You can never tell when depression might be alleviated; many people who tried to kill themselves because of depression have later recovered and think their suicidal ideation was mistaken. True, but for someone like Iris Dekker, who had tried everything, saying “you might get better” is letting someone suffer forever despite having made a gazillion attempts to find a reason to live. Note that Subramanya reports that psychiatric MAID is rare even where legal:

Even in countries that have been at the forefront of assisted dying, psychiatric euthanasia is still rare. The Netherlands had 174 cases of psychiatric euthanasia in 2025—about 1.7 percent of its euthanasia deaths and 0.1 percent of deaths overall. Of the 338 euthanasia applications received at the Euthanasia Expertise Center in 2025 from patients younger than 30 that involved psychiatric suffering, only 11 were approved. None were minors.

This worry can be alleviated by a process of rigorous vetting, which, given the statistics above, seems already in place. While it of course cannot guarantee that someone allowed MAID could some day recover from psychiatric illness, if they’ve tried many ways to get better and yet still remain suicidal after years, it seems cruel for someone else to say that we should let them live because we don’t know what would happen. It is in effect trying to control someone else’s existence.

3.) The slippery slope argument: MAID for mental illness will lead not only to expansion of the process to those who don’t really qualify, but also, as Rupa says, “people who were socially isolated, people who were homeless, people who were on disability and people who just felt a great sense of despair.”

Again, this can be alleviated by rigorous vetting, and by involving doctors and therapists who aren’t in the business of willy-nilly approving candidates for MAID, just as there should be procedures preventing doctors from prescribing opioids for no good reason. Of course no system is perfect, but when you see someone like Iris Dekker, who has suffered greatly for years and wants to die–and has tried to die by her own hand–slippery-slope arguments need to be contested.  There’s no need to go all the way to the bottom of the slope once you step off the summit.

4.) Laws like Canada’s that allow MAID if you’re suffering not from terminal illnesses, but from other medical conditions, are not supportable because you can’t judge what is “intolerable suffering.” 

Again, rigorous vetting is the best way to deal with this.  Who better than (objective) mental-health professionals and doctors can judge whether suffering is “intolerable”. especially when multiple drug and/or psychiatric regimens ahve been tried?

5.) The social argument (from Rupa): suffering should be solved and endured collectively rather than by personal choice. 

Here’s what Rupa says;

We’re fully rational actors making these decisions entirely on our own. But in reality, our choices are shaped by our relationships with people. It’s shaped by the environment that we’re in, and it’s shaped by economic conditions, whether we feel loved, supported, or abandoned. So his argument is that autonomy is never fully independent because we make decisions within this context. I think with Canada, and then you have a political class in a place like Canada that is more than happy to enable all of these things. And so I feel like all of these things have come together in Canada, in the Netherlands as well.

I don’t really understand this argument, but it figures in the example of Rupa’s father (see below). If someone is suffering and can’t be cured, why should this be a problem that can’t be solved by the individual?  And of course the state does get involved when MAID is considered.

6.) Different doctors have different standards for “intolerable suffering.” Further, at least in Canada, some doctors, says Rupa, tend to get on oversight committees who are on board with MAID, so the procedure becomes easier to get. Rupa says this:

I think that some of the doctors I’ve spoken to think that they’re basically God. they feel powerful in making these decisions one doctor I spoke to she’s a prolific maid provider in British Columbia in Vancouver and she loves the limelight she loves talking about the patients she’s euthanized over the years and she started off I think she was a she went from delivering babies to now euthanizing people and she told me look and she said this elsewhere as well that I like to push the boundaries as much as I can when it comes to medical assistance anddying and that was pretty extraordinary to me. [JAC: remember, this is a transcript taken from the podcast, so there are infelicities of speech as well as outright errors in transcription.]

Again, choose well known and objective physicians; that is the best you can do. And of course usual more than just two or three doctors. Remember that MAID for mental illness is not yet legal in Canada.

7.) Hastening death is “the path of least resistance”, and in many cases may be less expensive and time-consuming than treatment for years and years. Here’s another quote from Rupa:

You do have cases where people can change their minds, but eventually the system decides that it should be the option. There was another case of a man with cancer who became delirious and very unresponsive in hospital. And according to this report, the doctors aroused him, shook his head and interpreted his blinks and the responses he was mouthing as consent and then proceeded to kill him that very same day. So basically, what all of this tells me is that. . .  there’s a medical culture now which is hastening death. And, you know, as one ethicist put it to me, he said this is the path of least resistance now.

If the law is made with the input of ethicists, this should be prevented. Again, the solution seems to be rigorous vetting and oversight rather than letting people suffer forever. And of course you can give control over your medical treatment to others via “do no resuscitate” orders and the like (I have these).

8.) MAID “normalizes” euthanasia and suicide.  Another quote from Rupa:

Hughes: Are you saying because of MADE, we’re entering this culture of normalization of suicide? And because of that, Some young people, they form that expectation that like, yeah, I have a right to die because of this culture. And then if they get rejected, they seek other means where like maybe in the past, without that culture of normalizing euthanasia and suicide, maybe they wouldn’t have even gone down the road. Is that sort of what you’re implying?

Subramanya: Yeah.

“Normalizing euthanasia” does not necessarily mean making it the go-to option.  And we are talking about euthanasia, not “regular” suicide.

9.) Religious reason #2: One role of religion should be to keep people off the slippery slope. Here’s an exchange from the podcast:

Hughes: But if you don’t have a religious view that life is sacred and that suicide is a sin, then it’s possible to talk yourself into it and kind of reason your way into ending your life if you really are at a low point and you are suffering, right? Is that what this is?

Subramanya: Yes, I think religion is certainly one institution when you look at the fact that as I mentioned earlier We’ve become a very individualistic society where suffering is no longer done communally, it’s not experienced communally, but on your own, where previously, you know, you’d go to the church or to the temple or to the mosque or whatever religion you belong to. But now, you know, a lot of us live in isolation, especially young people, you know, who are, I think, we’re still seeing some of the effects of the pandemic rapidly. right now where young people have been struggling with loneliness and alienation and mental health issues and then where suicide is not treated as something that you prevent but increasingly something that you facilitate so religion for sure. If you’re talking about how institutions once played a very important role in making us feel connected, that’s changed quite a bit.

Subramanya seems to have forgotten that it is also religion that’s been the main obstacle to any form of MAID, even for terminal illness (Mother Teresa is one example of someone who thought Jesus will take people when he’s ready). Is Subramanya suggesting that we should try to foist religious solutions onto someone seeking MAID?  Too late: religion is disappearing now, and you don’t go proselytizing someone who is suffering.

When Subramanya tells this story about her father, who found a reason to live, she seems to use it as an example of why anyone, however ill, can find a reason to live.  But people differ in how they bear suffering:

. . . I learned that my father in India was diagnosed with primary central nervous system lymphoma. They found a cyst in his brain and he needed a very urgent brain biopsy. As I was writing about Keanu’s death, this 27-year-old young person with type 1 diabetes and blindness and that he had given up on life, I was watching my own father fight desperately to hold on to his. And five months later, my father can’t speak because the part of the brain on which they operated controls speech. He has undergone chemotherapy and radiation.

He’s doing really well. His cancer is in remission. But what strikes me most is Not just merely his resilience, it is his desire to live. I mean, despite the pain and exhaustion, the loss of speech, the humiliations that he’s experienced, that serious illness brings about in people. You mentioned your mother who had who died of cancer. He’s soldiering on. He still loves life. And he wants more time. He’s fighting for every single day. And he finds joy in ordinary moments.

So, you know, for me, you know, as someone who’s written quite extensively about death, I look at my father and I wonder like what Why is he so different from someone who is 73 years old here in Canada, perhaps given a similar diagnosis and chooses made? Or why does a 28-year-old give up on life? And I don’t think my father in India is an outlier in the sense that he wants to live as much as possible. I think in places like India, you still have strong cultural family ties. I think religion continues to be extremely important. And I think these are factors, these are things that are increasingly, they’re disappearing in the West.

Once again we see religion mentioned as a way to keep people off the slippery slope of MAID. But what if you are not religious and cannot force yourself to believe? Someone like me, for instance.

In the end, I see both the article and podcast (not Hughes) infected with religiously-tinged arguments. I’ve long viewed the Free Press, while ideologically appealing in several ways, as too soft on religion—too eager to see it as caulk for our “god-shaped” holes.  This article may be one example.

Click on “continue reading” below to see descriptions of the five countries medical assistance in dying is legal for those with psychiatric issues:

From Grok:

My question:  Which countries allow medical assistance in dying for psychiatric problems or other mental issues?

How Grok answered:

As of May 2026, a small number of countries explicitly permit medical assistance in dying (MAiD, which includes physician-administered euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide) where a psychiatric disorder or other mental health issue is the sole underlying medical condition (or the primary source of unbearable suffering). In these jurisdictions, the person must generally be an adult with decision-making capacity, make a voluntary and well-considered request, experience constant and unbearable suffering with no prospect of reasonable improvement, and have exhausted relevant treatment options. Psychiatric cases remain relatively rare (typically 1–2% of total MAiD cases where data are available).Here is the current list of countries where this is allowed:

• Netherlands: Euthanasia is legal for psychiatric disorders under the 2002 law if the patient has “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement.” This has been in practice for over two decades, with official reports documenting dozens of cases annually (e.g., 115 psychiatric cases in 2021).
• Belgium: Euthanasia is permitted for “constant and unbearable physical or mental suffering” from an incurable condition (including psychiatric disorders) since the 2002 law. Requests require multiple written statements, medical confirmation, and review. Psychiatric cases are reported (e.g., 26 in 2022).
• Luxembourg: The 2009 law allows euthanasia or assisted suicide for an incurable medical condition causing unbearable physical or mental suffering with no prospect of improvement. Psychiatric disorders qualify under the same criteria as in the other Benelux countries.

 

• Switzerland: Assisted suicide (not physician-administered euthanasia) is permitted. A 2006 Federal Supreme Court ruling explicitly extended this to individuals with “incurable, permanent, severe psychological disorders,” provided the person has decision-making capacity and the wish is autonomous (not a symptom of a treatable mental disorder). Right-to-die organizations facilitate this, often with psychiatric evaluation.
• Spain: The 2021 Organic Law on the Regulation of Euthanasia allows MAiD (euthanasia or assisted suicide) for a “serious and incurable illness” or “serious, chronic, and incapacitating condition” causing constant and unbearable suffering (physical or mental). While a 2023 Constitutional Court ruling sought to limit purely psychiatric cases to those with a somatic basis, practice and recent cases (including a high-profile 2026 euthanasia of a 25-year-old woman with mental illness after legal proceedings) confirm eligibility is possible under the law’s broad criteria.

Did you spot all three California tree frogs in this morning’s photo? Here’s the “reveal” shot, with the three amphibians circled by Robert Lang: