Geologists, do you still use them? Brunton Compass

Lex Anteinternet: Brunton Compass: 

Brunton Compass

Brunton Pocket Transit, folded for carrying.

Saturday October 11, 1941. Roosevelt writes to Churchill

 The topic was atomic research.

Wednesday July 27, 1921. Insulin isolated.

On this day in 1921 the Insulin A hormone was successfully isolated for the first time by Canadian scientists Frederick Banting and Best.

Best and Banting.

Their discovery, with Banting in the lead, involved the use of dogs, which they gave diabetes and then reversed, confirming their discovery.  They didn't announce it until later that Fall.  

Banting would receive a Nobel Prize in 1923 at which time he was 32  years old, still the youngest recipient in the medical category.  Canada granted Banting a lifetime annuity to continue his studies and he was knighted in 1932.

Banting's Nobel Prize was shared with J. J. R. Macleod who ovesaw his work as he had no training in physicology.  Macleod assigned James Collip, a biochemist to the project.  Interstingly, the team did not get along and Banting and Macleod were at odds over it as it went along, with Macleod skeptical of the project.  The Nobel Prize was controversial, and Banting somewhat discounted Macleod's role, which in later years was found to be greater than it was supposed at the time.

Both me felt that their colleagues were unfairly omitted.  Banting shared half of his prize money with Best, and Macleod shared half with Collip.

Banting went on to a notable and sometimes controversial publich career, engaging in a public dispute with the Hudson's Bay Company over the treatment of Canadian natives.  He died in an airplane accident in 1941, at which time he was working in the field of aviation medicine.

Best went on to a long career in medicine.  Macleod returned to Scotland as a professor and died in 1935 at age 58.  His reputation did not recover during his lifetime and was tarnishes by both Best and Banting, but it has since recovered.  Collip continued on in a long career.

On the same day Japan agreed to attend disarmament talks in the United States.

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

Graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.

You can be what you want. ..  you just can't want what you want. This determines what you want.

From Lawrence of Arabia.

In in the film Lawrence of Arabia, there's a point at which Sharif Ali confronts Lawrence with his having said, earlier in the film, that "you can be anything you want". Set out above is Lawrence's cinematic answer.

And its correct.

When I was young, I had to study genetics.

The reason for that was that I was a geology student, and while those who aren't familiar with the discipline may imagine that you study rocks all day, in actuality its an incredibly diverse field of study.  Biology was a big element of geology, but paleobiology.  That involved genetics in a major, major way.  As a geology student, you learned that genetics is destiny and a controlling, immutable, factor in reality.

In fact, quite frankly, I think you end up learning that more deeply, in some areas, than biologist do.  You become deeply aware of evolutionary biology, which is its own field really, and which is something that has an overarching impact on everything else, and I mean everything else, more than anything else in the physical world.

You are what you are, to a major degree, due to evolutionary biology.

You also became aware that this wasn't accepted by everyone in society. At that time, it wasn't accepted by Protestant fundamentalists, and it still isn't.  I recall being in a paleontology lab when a person came into it as he wanted to debate our professor, Don Boyd, about evolution.  Evolution is applied genetic paleobiology.  The person who came in, however, armed with a misconstruction of the Old Testament, had further armed himself with pseudo science to support his position that evolution wasn't.  It is.^[1]. 

That sort of experience left a person with not only a solid grounding in biology and paleobiology, and a really solid grounding in science itself, but also with an expectation that there were people out there who didn't accept scientific reality.

None the less, I'd never have guessed the extent to which this has become true in the 35 years that have passed since the event noted above.  And not just with "conservatives" or the right wing of politics, as is so often claimed, but with the left as well.  Indeed, it can be maintained pretty clearly that both sides of the political spectrum have their own major problems with different areas of the scientific fields, with the right really having one right now with medical science and certain of the physical sciences, and the left having one with the topic of human evolutionary biology.^[2].   Each side would prefer to just make things up in these areas, or certain portions of these areas.

The depiction set out above, as noted, is a graphical representation of the idealized human diploid karyotype.  This particular examples shows the organization of the genome into chromosomes, further showing both the female (XX) and male (XY) versions of the 23rd chromosome pair.

This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are.  It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine.  It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.  Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that it isn't even funny.  That's why, in fact, in terms of paleontology these "species" can only be regarded as a "species" if you are a "splitter".  If you are  a "lumper", and thereby a member of that scientific group that holds that the classic definition of a species is the prioper one, that being if a male and female individual can breed and produce a viable offspring (capable of breeding itself), they're one species.  Frankly, this is the correct view in my opinion, and the opposite view is only held, in my opinion, as developed species that we've genetically altered over times, such as canines, are viewed instinctively by us as more than one species because of what we've developed.  In other words, we think dogs and wolves are different species only because we can't imagine wolves and labradoodles being in the same species.  Genetically, however, the better argument is that they are.^[3]. 

Okay, so what is this about?

Well, to kick it off, Demi Lavato just a week ago or so announced that she's "non binary".  She even wants to be called "they", rather than she.

No, she's not non binary, she's a woman, and that makes her a she.

Let's note here that sexual inclination, or no inclination at all, doesn't define your biology.  Your biology defines your biology.  If you have a female biology, and she does, you are a women.  If you have male biology, you are a man.

That, we'd note again, has nothing to do with your individual desires, irrespective of what they are and regardless of their origin.  Almost every living human being alive has some desire to be something other than what they are, at some level.  Not all of that is biological by any means, but some of it is.  People struggle with desires to be thinner, stronger, taller, or free of physical impairments of all sorts all the time.  Wishing doesn't make it so, and you can't insist that other recognize these features as non existent.  Indeed, doing so is a lie, and if you are doing it regarding yourself, you are lying to yourself, which is a very bad think to do.

An organization that's in this end of the social spectrum, and this is a societal and cultural deal, not a biological or physical one, argues on its site that while most human beings are male or female, some are not, and they're non binary, and moreover that this has always been true.

It hasn't always been true, and in additional that confuses society and culture with science, which are not the same thing.

What's always true with 100% of mammals, absent extremely rare conditions which are generally regarded as a species of biological defect (which doesn't make a person so afflicted bad), is that humans are born with either male reproductive organs, or females ones.  Moreover, this difference in our species is not only significant, its massively significant.

We'll have another thread that will no doubt anger some that we were going to quote from, in advance, here, but instead we'll just take it on directly, and maybe quote there, what we'll type here.

We're primates, which is pretty obvious, and as primates we are members of the animal group that has the highest sexual dimorphism than another mammal. Great apes, of which we're a member, are very pronounced in that regard, and our genus, Homo, is through the roof on it.  Like it or not, and there's plenty of evidence that lots of people don't like it, and that it's a problem in various ways (more on that in other upcoming posts as well) that's a fact.  Evolutionary biology teaches us that early on in earlier Homo progenitors there came a time when our brains got big, the off spring needed long nurturing, and things really got rolling in all sorts of ways.  The males ended up stronger, much stronger, and aggressive for a reason.  The females were weaker and frankly much more maternal than the males.  Because of being tied for years to their children, they depended upon the foodstuff support from the males, and the result was that humans evolved disparate, but constant, sexual drives, that tying the males to the females on an individual basis.  Indeed, psychologist are now well aware of what St. Paul was early on, that sex fused a man to a woman in an irrevocable psychological way that made promiscuity particularly perverse.

This isn't really on that topic, but again it is.   There are men, women, and that's biologically it.  Generally that's psychologically it as well.  "Non binary" or "transgenderism" doesn't really exist but rather reflect present sociology, which is more cultural than physical.

What does exist, however, is a wide ranging human mind that's now set outside, very much outside, of its eco niche.  And as we've become richer and richer, over time, we've naturally, because of our original evolution, come to focus on our genitals, as odd as that may seem.

But another way, of you are Oot Gronk, Cro Magnon, and a man, your daily focus is probably on finding things to hunt and kill, or pick up and eat, and avoiding bears.   Sure, the babes have your attention and you're likely in a natural marriage with one.  And for her, the focus will be on the kiddos and also on finding something to eat and hoping that Oot doesn't get killed by a bear.

In that environmental regime, think resources are going to keep everyone focused on the thin resources and overcoming them.  Indeed, if you ever have the experience of being in thin resources, which most people in the Western world don't anymore, in this real existential sense, you'll find that the level of pondering of sex is pretty low.  Contrary to what people tend to imagine, for example, about old fashioned basic training, which was pretty much all male, is that this topic isn't on anyone's mind and if there's focus on anything inappropriate, it's probably on beer at the 1-2-3 Club.

Indeed, studies on men who are left in really isolated environments where they need to be focused shows that by and large, they don't think about women at all.  I haven't read anything on women, but logic would hold that they probably don't much either.  Those studies tend to show that men who are busy don't tend to start thinking about women until there's women around, and at that point they still don't think about them that much if they're really tied up in something on a continual basis.

You really have to have an element of leisure, or at least down time, until these things start to come up much.  And while that time comes up in our original aboriginal state, it does in a  pretty concentrated fashion and in one in which people are really still pretty focused.  As an example, its' been noted that Native American societies had really low birth rates, far below European Americans at the same period, and one of the early features of European/Native American contact was that women were attracted to European men (or European American men) as they were comparatively wealthy and much less restrained in regard to abstention (we're trying to be delicate here).

Leaping forward, we'd first note, as we have before, that the current set of definitions in regard to sexual orientation categories is really recently, dating back only a little over 100 years ago.  This doesn't mean that acts based on the non typical orientation didn't occur, but the identification categories now made are social categories, not scientific ones.  And its also not really until societies have enough wealth to have leisure does an expansion of culture, and cultural specialization, arise. That's also about when we really start to notice this phenomenon.

That suggests that the phenomenon itself is a cultural and psychological one, which I'd note doesn't mean right off the bat, as some will assume we're leaping to, that I'm asserting this is a mental illness. But it is worth noting that as a phenomenon its much more recognized among people of European extraction.  General Asian cultures regard its as solely a "white" matter and wholly cultural in origin, although certain the same things happen in every Asian culture.

Okay, what's all this suggest?

Well for starters it suggest that people are leaping to conclusions that these things are real in a scientific, i.e., biological, sense, which isn't very well supported at all.  Indeed, the opposite its true although it does seem that some people may be more genetically predisposed to them than others.  But its still the case that all humans are male, and female, that's flat out it.

It also suggest that the modern definitions perhaps should be reconsidered as the least.  Indeed, it tracks back to a really long, probably overlong, thread we did awhile back which brings up the point that maybe these definitions are actually completely in error and, ironically, those backing them may actually be backing a set of concepts that originated with definitions that served to categorize these things as mental illnesses.

If that's the case, and there's pretty good evidence that there is, those who are awash in the new definitions should both rejoice and recoil, as it gets back to the science, which doesn't endorse the new views, but doesn't endorse the old categories either.

Basically, what that leaves us with is humans, and as a species we have a wide range of traits, and one of our characteristics sit hat there are those among us who always depart from the median, and those departures are benign or harmful in very degrees, and oddly enough, in varying times in varying degrees.  A person has to accept that. But that doesn't change you from what you basically are, which means you're either a man, or a woman not both or neither, and you really can't choose to be the other.

And you really shouldn't, for that part.

Oh, why not, you may ask?  Isn't crafting your own reality nifty and guaranteed to have a better chance of making you happy?

Nope, it isn't, on lots of scores.

All of this is presenting an interesting set of unanticipated modern problems, again only of that type that a really rich society can have. And they're problems that could be avoided.

To start with, denying concrete scientific realities is simply dangerous in its own right, and we know that.  Indeed, we see that all the time with people who have ignored scientific realities in regard to diet and substances, with any number of tragic results occurring nearly daily.

Here, although we often fail to realize it, we constantly see it in regard to attempting to take on our psychological desires medically or pharmaceutically, which tends to produce widespread suffering.  Indeed, I'll note one that people often don't think about in this context, which is directly related, that being pharmaceutical birth control.

Pharmaceutical birth control was first introduced in the early 1960s.  For the most part, so far, designed to hormonally alter a woman's natural cycle, it should be pretty obvious that ingesting hormones to defeat a natural system is going to have some pretty risky results, and yet we've been happy to accept them, we think, for over 50 years now.

And yet in that time these substances have been shown to cause an increase in cancer and stroke, two risks that, I'm pretty sure, would cause them to be banned by the FDA as a class if they were just being introduced. They're also demonstrated to have an impact on female psychology in a way that isn't really understood, with it being shown that women taking them judge long term male mates significantly differently if they're on them, than if they are not.^[4]. 

Societally it can be argued that they've been a disaster as they've broken down the social order to an enormous degree.  This is a point often raised by social conservatives and particularly by religious conservatives from those branches of Christianity that oppose pharmaceutical birth control, which are principally the Apostolic faiths.  Irrespective of how a person identifies with these groups, however, the argument is solid as the change in overall behavior has decoupled the original link between men, women, sex and longevity or relationships by severing its natural procreative purpose from the picture, all while leaving the basic instinctive pattern, including the imprinting it causes, in place. 

Given that example, and numerous others, a good case can be made for the position that medical and pharmaceutical treatments that go to address natural biological makeup are a really bad idea.  Indeed, in some other areas we've already concluded that.  Nobody, for example, would now advocate the psychosurgery that Rosemary Kennedy was subjected to, for example.  And yet that was an accepted treatment at the time, much like gender reassignment procedures have suddenly become in the last few years.

Added to that, as that's occurred, there have been developments that have led to concern and pushback.  Indeed, just while in the US procedures are expanding down to the child level, in Europe they're being banned on the basis that childhood expressions of identity in this area tend to be subject to being false where as the procedures themselves can be devastating for the recipients.  

Indeed Reddit, where seemingly everything is located, has a subreddit simply made up of people trying to reverse their gender reversal. This is yet another thing I discovered by accident (like the completely disgusting subreddit that is made up of Hentai representations of World War Two naval ships) but it has a surprising level of participation, which given the generally low levels of the overall population who undertakes a reassignment in the first place, should at least give a person pause.^[5]. 

And all that points out that if a person is uncomfortable in their own skin, there's likely a greater reason for it than the one they perceive.  A person can medicate themselves out of a greater reality, and can have a surgeon cut out a greater reality either.  The risks of trying that are vast.

And in someway they're dishonest to oneself and to society at large.

An example of that is provided by cosmetic surgery, which is concentrated in the female portion of the population and which is more over fixated on breasts.  All kinds of women go through surgery they don't' need to have unnatural large breasts when there's no point to such a surgery, in a healthy woman, at all.  Inserting foreign bodies in a healthy body is a bad idea in and of itself.  Moreover, given yourself a visual reproductive advantage, which is what is the underlying goal, is destructive to society overall, given the really odd idea to everyone that everyone needs to look like one of Hugh Hefner's visual prostitutes, and further promoting an idea that visual attractiveness is so important over everything else that surgery is warranted to achieve it.

Indeed, on that last point, all of this gets back to the idea that we ought to be sex focused, and sex focused on a way that has nothing to do with reproduction.  This isn't healthy societal focus.  Indeed, it tends toward trivializing the entire topic.

People who advocate for those in this area commonly tend to point out historical figures, often with some wide liberties taken, who had these tendencies. Its often noted that they had really productive lives and that their tendencies were never acknowledged, even by those who had them.  This isn't always the case, of course, but there's something significant in that.  They may not have acknowledged them in part because our modern understandings of these things are wrong, i.e., people can't be put in a box like that, and also because these people were busy, i.e., a lot of the time they had something else that really was taking up their time.

Indeed, that was even the case in the entertainment industry more than it is now, where plenty of experimentation with all sorts of things seems to go on constantly.  Entertainers seem to have more time to engage in themselves than other people do in general, so it shouldn't be too surprising that these things surface more there, but as noted, plenty of people who were supposedly "closeted" may very well not have been, or if they were the same thing would apply; they were just really busy.  

Beyond that, however, a lot of the time on any social movement, we're just flat out wrong.  People with strong roots in the evolutionary biology sense of things, or with very strong roots in history or the history of philosophy, tend to be very aware of that, but regular people and even extraordinary people just living their lives often are not.  Cutting edge developments seem like they must be true as they're happening now.  Over time, this leads to a lot of things that seemed to be new and true turning out to have been new and false. As noted above, the entire current conceptualization of sexuality outside of biology and evolutionary biology basically goes back to Freud, who is now regarded as wrong on darned near everything.  Everything we're currently obsessed with in this area now, on a societal basis, may very well turn out to be as well.  

Indeed, the fact that it may very well turn out to be is in part demonstrated by the lengths that people have to go to ignore the problems this creates.

The other day I read an editorial by a top preforming female athlete noting that she couldn't compete against "transgender females". Why?  Well, if you grow up male most of your body remains male, no matter what you do with your reproductive organs later on.  In other words, they're stronger as that's the way nature made them.  This is accordingly creating an unfair problem for "born females" if you will, who shouldn't have to accommodate themselves to this.

Likewise, the back and forth in the military is surreal.  We'll have a future post coming up on the topic of women in combat, but for the time being we'd note that there are those in the service who have transitioned from male to female, in the current vernacular.  As the essence of military service is serving in war, how does the United States government plan on accommodating this ongoing medical treatment requiring status in time of war, and should it have to?  And if those who have done this are captured from our service, which doesn't recognize male/female divides (although as we'll show it should), what then.  Are the Chinese or North Koreans going to accommodate it?

Finally, ignoring nature is done at your absolute hazard, and we've gotten away with about as much of this as we can.  This lesson should be obvious, but we live in such surreal times that "progressives" can fixate on nature while arguing that humans can create their own reality.  We're part of nature, however, and we can't get away with that indefinitely.

At some point in the future, and probably more quickly than we care to even think of, all of this current experimentation is going to come back to haunt us.  It's already haunting some now.  But believing that sociology is ever accurate is a pretty foolish assumption in the first place, and ignoring nature is an even more foolish one.  We ought to step back, and maybe step out.

Footnotes:

1.  Okay, I want to note right here that I won't entertain an argument that discussing evolution is contrary to the Christian faith.  It isn't.

Right now, on the edge of town, there's a large billboard by some obviously conservative Protestant organization that states we're created, not evolved, with the classic crossed out traffic symbol in use.  

People who take this point of view also tend to take the view that the Bible establishes that the world is around 7,000 or so years old, which is wrong.  The Bible doesn't state that and the world is way, way older than that.  Additionally, people who take this view are highly literal in their reading of the Bible in some things, and tend to ignore it completely in others.  For instance, almost everyone who is going to take the strict reading of the word "created" is also going to hold a solo scriptura view of the New Testament, even though the New Testament never defines the canon of scripture anywhere whatsoever, and therefore if you are at an intellectual dead end immediately.

Anyhow, nowhere in the Bible does it say how God went about creating things, only that He did.  It borders on arrogance to assume God couldn't create the current biological world through evolution.  For those who would pose the question why would he do that, why wouldn't he.  Presuming to know the mind of God for such things assumes more than can be assumed.

As a member of one of the Apostolic faiths, I'd note I'm part of the majority wing of Christianity that doesn't have doctrine in this are and doesn't feel it has to, as it doesn't have to.  The view of the Catholic Church is that science illuminates the Divine Creation, so following science is not antithetical to the Faith, properly understood in both venues.  I'd argue that insisting that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution is made up, is a problem however as it makes Christians look ignorant and creates the dummy argument that Faith, Reason and Science can't be reconciled, when in fact they aren't at odds to start with.

Anyhow, I'll state my view.  Evolution is a fact.  

2.  For absolutely baffling reasons, its impossible to discuss vaccinations in certain right wing circles now as the science on this, which is now ancient, isn't accepted. It's not clear why it isn't accepted, but its concentrated just in that demographic.

Conservatives for some time have been hugely skeptical on climate science, which is a bit different as the climate is hard to figure.  I'm noting it here, however, as it goes from scholarly skepticism at higher levels to sort of a rational that if my livelihood depends on it, the science must be wrong, at another level, which may be how a lot of skepticism works on everything, I suppose.

As will be seen here, however, progressives are outright rejecting biology in favor of an extraordinarily recent social set of concepts.  Never mind that it just doesn't fit the science.

3. Indeed dogs make a really interesting examples as they must be the species that's more genetically engineered by human than any others, leading to examples that bear so little resemblance to the wolf, or even to other dogs, that its not funny.  At the end of the day, however, all dogs are "mutts".

A friend of mine who is a big Labrador Retriever fan tends to scoff at the dog I have, a North American Retriever (Double Doodle) as they're a "designer breed".  But in fact, all dogs are.  As I point out to him, the only "purebred" dog is the wolf.

4.  This has been shown to be real, and widespread, but why isn't understood.  For whatever reason, however, women who aren't on them tend to make different value judgments about different character traits than women who are.

It'd be tempting to regard this as selection bias, i.e., women who are on them are one group and women who are not a second. But that doesn't work as women who go off them change their mental calculations, so something else is at work here.  Moreover, it seems that women who are off them make much "safer" calculations.  I.e. the mates they choose are more likely to stick around, be stable, etc. etc.

Psychologically, it'd be tempting to believe that being on them just recalculates the mental dice as women are weighting sex more than long term stability, but that doesn't seem to be it.  The analysis still applies to women who marry while taking them. What's going on here simply isn't clear but something's going on.

5. Overall, all of this goes to show that the Internet is full of traps for the unwary.

I've already noted here the Tessa Fowler incident in which I went to look up wildlife photographer Tessa Fowler, about whom an article was published in the Tribune. Instead of finding her web page, however, I instead found that there's a second Tessa Fowler who is a naked boob model.  That's not who I was looking for.  My guess is that wildlife photography Fowler receives a lot less viewing than boob model Fowler, and that a fair percentage of people who find the wildlife photographer were looking for somebody else, which is the opposite experience I had.

Since that time, much more recently, I ran an item here about the May 24, 1941 sinking of the HMS Hood.  A search on that revealed that some really odd characters draw Hentai drawings of WWII ships as large chested women, and that they'd done a cartoon rendition of the Battle of the Demark Straits as the Bismarck, and Prinz Eugen, as two badly drawn women feeling up a topless HMS Hood, also so depicted.  That is truly perverse.  Lots of men lost their lives on the Hood, and for that matter the Bismarck.

The aforementioned subreddit was discovered following a history tweet by an individual who turns out to be one of the people reversing a reassignment. Usually reddit commenters stay more or less in one area of comment, but obviously not everyone does.

All of this may seem irrelevant/amusing, etc. but I think it's actually directly related to the phenomenon being discussed.  Prior to the Internet people with all sorts of latent sexual desires that don't reflect hte majority of such things probably often went through their lives with those desires never really surfacing.  Now they are in part because they're there for the exploration without restraint in the privacy of a person's home.  If biology is incapable of fully explaining how these departures from teh mean develop, culture and acculturation clearly help fill in part of the puzzle.  Medical doctors have widely reported the spreads of diseases in young people, for example, that formerly were fairly rare and associated with certain deviant acts. The fact that they're now more common means that the acts are more common, and the Internet is likely playing a role in that.

Related  Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

But what if we are wrong?

Blog Mirror: If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus)

 

If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus)

April 25, 1921. Famous visitors

Elsa Einstein, Albert Einstein, and President Harding.  Elsa and Albert Einstein were fairly newly married at this time, having been married in 1919 following Albert's divorce from his first wife.  They were not only related by marriage, but by blood, as their mothers were sisters and their father's first cousins, a circumstances that would have prohibited their marriage in most, if not all, US states.

On this day in 1921, Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa visited President Harding.  Einstein was suddenly famous following the fairly recent eclipse which went to support his general theory of relativity.

The Japanese government voted against a resolution to allow women to participate in political parties.

Communist in Fiume staged a coup after losing an election there.

The Allied Reparations Commission demanded that Germany pay 1,000,000 Marks in gold to France by April 30.

Nebraska prohibited anyone who was not a U.S. citizen or resident alien from owning property in the state.

April 19, 1941. National Service.

 The British passed their second National Conscription Act on this day in 1941.

An act passed the day after the German invasion of Poland created military conscription for all men who had obtained 18 years of age and who were not yet 42, meaning that Britain was including some men who had be liable to conscription in World War One, during which the conscription age eventually went up to age 50.  Exemptions were made for war work and health.  Keep in mind, however, that being liable for service did not necessarily mean that a person would be called up.

The second conscription act required men up to 60s years of age to perform some war service, which included military service for men up to 51 years of age.  It lifted the exemption for men under 20 years of age for foreign service.  And it made unmarried women without children between the ages of 20 and 30 liable for war service at home, other than military service.

On the same day London suffered a heavy bombing raid.

A research from Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana was photographed on this day flagging for ticks.

February 23, 1941. Storms

Today In Wyoming's History: February 23: 1941  Blizzard conditions stalled traffic in the state.  This was, of course, in the pre 4x4 days.  Prior to World War Two 4x4 vehicles were almost unheard of and were limited to industrial vehicles. Almost every vehicle was a rear wheel drive 2x4.

On the same day Mussolini gave a speech admitting that Italy was experiencing "gray days", but states that such things happen and all wars and promising better days ahead as Italy marched towards a promised fascist victory.

The Germans continued their round up of Amsterdam's Jewish population.

And plutonium was discovered.

Blog Mirror: Ancient Trees Show When The Earth's Magnetic Field Last Flipped Out

 

Ancient Trees Show When The Earth's Magnetic Field Last Flipped Out

February 17, 1921. Relativity.

Margaret Wilson, the First Lady at the time, and officer of the National Women's Party Abby Scott Baker, on this day in 1921.  The National Women's Party was holding its first post women's suffrage convention.  Both Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Baker are wearing clothing that's actually "sustainable" fashion, as opposed to the b.s. about that which is cycled now.  More on that in a future post.

Nature published an issue focused on Einstein's general theory of relativity, the moment at which it became widely known.

 

Blog Mirror: USDA’s Cutting-Edge Methods Help Deliver a Victory Against Asian Giant Hornet

 USDA’s Cutting-Edge Methods Help Deliver a Victory Against Asian Giant Hornet

Lex Anteinternet: No Surprise: Astronomers find no signs of alien t...

Lex Anteinternet: No Surprise: Astronomers find no signs of alien t...: Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars So read a recent headline. This gets to the Fermi Paradox, name...

It's interesting the extent to which people just don't want to believe this.

No sooner had I posted this item than we were greeted with headlines stating:

Hint's of Life Venus's Clouds

Which were contradicted in the article which noted experts, including three of the author's authors, stated their findings on Venus's cloud chemistry were "far from the first proof of life".

No Surprise: Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars

Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars

So read a recent headline.

This gets to the Fermi Paradox, namely if there are aliens from space out there, where are they?  While some will make strained arguments, the fact is that there just isn't any evidence of them at all, and with this, there's now even less.

This is answered neatly by an interview of a scientist in the Smithsonian's Air and Space magazine some years ago. There isn't anyone out there.  I.e., there's no life in space.

Most people don't like that idea, but frankly the odds against life being anywhere are profoundly long.  There shouldn't be life here.  Nobody ever has been able to get over the profoundly improbable act of life coming forth from nothing much in the first place nor been able to explain it.  And even if it can be created from elements that are dead by their very nature in some freak way, which seems frankly impossible, keeping that thing alive is almost impossible.  

And yet people don't like that.  

It makes us unique in a disturbing way.  Nothing should be living anywhere at all. And life, no matter how long it might take, shouldn't evolve into a creature like us. .  let alone just one creature like us.  

It would mean that everything is extraordinarily unlikely, and extraordinarily fragile in some ways at the same time.

It also suggests, indeed demands, an outside element to it to make any sense at all.

Which gets to another point.  If there are those who hold themselves to be scientific, or non scientific, who demand the presence of corporal being who are out there somewhere, in spite of the lack of evidence, why do so many of the same people resist the evidence for non corporal beings which is much more abundant?

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste: Debate continues about nuclear power's role in electricity production, particularly as it revolves around climate change. As a zero-emissions source of

Interesting article on this topic.

Nuclear power should be something that Greens, particularly radical Greens, should be screaming for night and day.  Indeed, any really scientific thought on energy that was designed to address safe, sustainable, and clean energy, would be based on nuclear power.  Opposition to it is so unscientific as to make Godzilla movies look like actual paleontology.  

Friday Farming: Dear Burger King: I'm a Cattle Rancher and I'm Not Mad. But Can We Talk?

Dear Burger King:  I'm a Cattle Rancher and I'm Not Mad. But Can We Talk?

November 6, 1919. Congress offers citizenship to Native American veterans.

American Indian soldier on sentry duty in Europe, World War One.

On this day in 1919 Congress passed legislation allowing the approximately 9,000 American Indians who served in the Armed Forces during World War One and who had obtained an honorable discharged to apply for citizenship.

BE IT ENACTED . . . that every American Indian who served in the Military or Naval Establishments of the United States during the war against the Imperial German Government, and who has received or who shall hereafter receive an honorable discharge, if not now a citizen and if he so desires, shall, on proof of such discharge and after proper identification before a court of competent jurisdiction, and without other examination except as prescribed by said court, be granted full citizenship with all the privileges pertaining thereto, without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the property rights, individuals or tribal, of any such Indian or his interest in tribal or other Indian property.

Few of them actually applied.

This is a bit of a confusing story in that some Indians already were citizens, and had been for decades, but the means by which they became citizens is not clear.  As a basic rule of thumb, Indians in the East tended to be regarded as citizens and this was all the more the case the greater their degree of assimilation.  Indians who came from reservations in the West were almost uniformly not American citizens.

This is one of those odd areas that tend to really shock people as the basic assumption is that American Indians were always citizens as they were Americans.  In fact, this wasn't the case and it still wasn't in 1919.  This gets into the topic of tribal sovereignty, which is somewhat complicated, but for our purposes here we'll simply note that on this date in 1919 Congress offered citizenship to those Indians who had served in the Great War and who wanted to apply for it. As noted, very few did.

Also on this day, Arthur Eddington made his presentation to the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society regarding his observations during a solar eclipse which confirmed Einstein's theories of special and general relativity.  Einstein would learn this while ill and bedridden due to wartime deprivation.  He was famous by the following day as a result of headlines around the world which announced the confirmation of his revolutionary theories.

Doc was seeking advice on whether to trade in a car or not. . . something that we're debating here a century later at the present time.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 2, 1919. E. G. (Gerry) Meyer, born.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 2: 1919  E. G. (Gerry) Meyer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and former Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wyoming was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  As of the date of this entry (2019) Professor Meyer was a alive and still occupying the noted position.

May 29, 1919. It's all relative

On this day in 1919 Woodrow Wilson, showing that he did indeed learn from history, did what he should have done back in 1916 and denied permission to Carranza to transport Mexican troops across American soil so that they could go into action against Pancho Villa.

That failure in 1915 had lead to Villa's cross border raid into the U.S. on March 9, 1916, which in turn launched the U.S. into its expedition into Mexico. That expedition failed to run Villa to ground, although for a time it looked like he'd been essentially defeated.  It nearly brought the U.S. and Carranza's government into war with each other, as while Carranza was dedicated to Villa's defeat, he also couldn't stand the through of Americans in arms on Mexican soil and he basically detested the American government in general.

None of which kept him from asking him to repeat the practice and bring troops by rail into the area near Juarez so that they could be ready to engage a resurgent Villa. This time Wilson refused.

A long solar eclipse lasting over six minutes occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.  It was the longest solar eclipse since May 27, 1416.  A longer one would occur on June 8, 1937.

This event was significant in that Astronomers were able to detect the bending of light from stars during the event, confirming Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

October 31, 1968 Peace talks, bombing halts, UFOs, and elections.

1.  Lyndon Johnson announced that actions over North Vietnam would cease the following day, citing progress in the Paris Peace talks.  Air operations had been going on over North Vietnam since 1965.

 F-105s bombing and being lead by a B-66.

2.  The University of Colorado's UFO Project issued a report that UFO's were bumpkis and that further pondering them was a waste of time.  It's conclusion that "Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." was guaranteed not to be accepted by those who held contrary opinions in spite of the evidence.

3.  The Harris Poll revealed that Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey was within 3% points of Nixon's 40% as the country headed to the polls.  George Wallace was commanding 16% and 7% hadn't made up their minds.

Mid Week At Work: Professor Almon Harris Thompson with his horse "Old Ute." Utah. 1872.