“I thought, ‘Okay, there’s a bunch of sea urchins in there, these guys are predators of urchins, nothing’s gonna happen,’” recalls Clements, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Moncton. The urchins, he says, hadn’t eaten anything in two weeks.
The next day, when Clements came into the lab, he couldn’t find the sun star. There was a pile of urchins on the side of the tank, with something red barely visible underneath. Clements pried the urchins off, revealing the victim.
“The sea star was absolutely decimated,” he says. “The urchins had just ripped it apart.”
It’s the next section that really puzzles me. On the one had it says intentional coordinated attack isn’t possible, and then right after that it suggests a mechanism for intentional coordinated attack.
…urchin attacks can’t be intentional since the animals don’t have a brain or central nervous system, she says. “Urchins doing a coordinated predatory attack is not biologically feasible.”
The synchronized attacks may be based on chemical consequences of the ongoing feeding releasing smells into the water, Clements says. Once the first urchin starts chewing on the sun star, the other urchins may start recognizing the sun star as food…
Eating seems like intent. Signaling seems like coordination.
Definitely food for thought (pun intended, of course) when thinking about drone swarms.
The Union Army in 1864 seized the Big Spring, Tennessee plantation where a slave named Jourdan worked. Upon being set free he moved to Dayton, Ohio with his wife and children.
Shortly after the Civil War ended Jourdan was begged to return to the Tennessee plantation by the man who had kept him a slave (Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson). Allegedly business was ailing and couldn’t continue without Jourdan doing the work.
The 1865 reply Jourdan sent to Anderson went into a newspaper and was widely reprinted. He passed away more than four decades later in 1907, aged 81, never having returned to the plantation.
Here’s one example:
Click to enlarge.
Here’s another, which removed the final paragraphs that diplomatically mentioned the common practice of white men raping the black daughters of their slaves
Click to enlarge.
Here’s the full text version:
[Written just as he dictated it]
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Let me start this crazy story by saying in 2007 there was a huge debate in Arizona about water washing away the border wall.
Yes, you read that right. Nearly 15 years ago — FIFTEEN — federal officials were sternly warned their wall designs would fail catastrophically due to basic water runoff.
In October 2007, before the fence was built by Kiewit Western Co. for $21.3 million, Organ Pipe officials told the U.S. Department of Homeland Security they were worried that the design would impede the movement of floodwater across the border; that debris would get trapped in the fence; that water would pool; and that the lateral flow of water would cause damage to the environment and patrol roads, according to a report issued by Organ Pipe in August 2008 about flooding that summer.
In response, the Border Patrol issued a final environmental assessment with a finding of no significant impact. It also said the fence would not impede the natural flow of water or cause flooding. […] At a December 2007 meeting, Kiewit officials stated in a handout that the fence design “would permit water and debris to flow freely and not allow pounding of water on either side of the border” because the drainage crossing grates “met hydraulic modeling requirements.”
“Now we know who’s right,” said Matt Clark, Southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Period. End of story.”
End of story? Sadly not.
Matt Clark was talking about the wall three years later in 2011 when that fancy $20 million “hydraulic modeling” wall, as predicted, simply washed away. Problems started immediately in 2008, prompting lawsuits and complaints about the wall operating like a weak dam and then it came down exactly as predicted.
It begs the question of whether people who had been advocating for these walls were taking a slice of $20 million; really didn’t mind if their overpriced wall malfunctioned or fell.
They may as well be building monuments to corruption and stupidity for all they care.
Lesson learned from this 2007 debacle? Not so fast.
Take a look at the big story now coming from Arizona.
Source: Gizmodo
José Manuel Pérez Cantú, the director of the nonprofit Cuenca de Los Ojos, said in an email that six gates were washed out at this location alone. Other gates were also reportedly impacted by the heavy rainfall and flooding. The power and height of the waters can be seen in not just the heavy gates ripped open but the debris that wrapped around intact portions of the wall.
Who could have predicted this? Ah yes, just about everyone.
Indeed. Anyone could have predicted this.
The border wall is becoming the standard for illustrating how to fail at security, but behind the obvious failure of the wall to function longer than a year are the massive corruption and ecological disaster stories that make it even worse.
Let me add a little more context to just how stupid the corruption was, from another section of the wall that failed.
…boasted at a campaign event in New Jersey that the wall was ‘going up at record speed’…
Steel panels from the fence in the town of Calexico, California were knocked down on Wednesday morning. The concrete used to anchor the 30ft-tall (9m) panels in place had not yet set.
You see boasts about how quickly the wall goes up, while the wall being a poorly-planned rush job is given as the excuse for it falling right back down.
Whistling can be a language, and there are still many to learn around the world.
Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels — louder than a car horn — and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise.
Makes sense and brings to mind that nobody that I know of has an app yet so a phone can translate text or speech to whistle.
Wouldn’t a phone be an excellent whistler?
Turns out it’s really easy to do for humans. One can shift from speech to whistle and be fluent in just eight months.
Learning to whistle a language you already speak is relatively straightforward. Díaz Reyes’s Spanish-language whistling students spend the first two or three months of the course learning to make a loud whistle with different pitches. “In the fourth or fifth month, they can make some words,” he says. “After eight months, they can speak it properly and understand every message.” This articulation of speech within a whistle only works for nontonal languages, where the pitch of speech sounds isn’t crucial to the meaning of the word. (English, Spanish and most other European languages are nontonal.)
I still think a phone app would be a logical augmentation so humans wouldn’t have to learn whistling at all if they wanted to instead use technology.
That also brings to mind that there is no whistling translator. Imagine having a microphone hear a whistle in one language and then a speaker (pun not intended) would whistle it in another language. Or a phone app could be fluent in all whistled languages…
Sorely missing from these narratives is the American experience. Whistling can be found in outlaw stories such as the one describing how the legendary Bass Reeves caught two wanted men:
As the sun was setting, Reeves heard a sharp whistle coming from beyond the house. Shortly afterward, the woman went outside and responded with an answering whistle. Before long, two riders rode up to the house…
