Quicklinks: 27 February – 5 March 2023

Good news, Mexican wolf numbers are increasing! To be clear, that’s Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. They were reintroduced in 1998 and are now at 241 wolves!

Unfortunately, not everything is good. There’s a worry that biophobia, the fear of nature, could lead to less conservation of wild spaces. With many people living in cities with few green spaces and opportunities to interact with wildlife, nature seems strange, scary and not worth preserving. This is something we need to guard against.

In my previous postdoc, I worked with Professor Don Cowan. There’s a nice article about him and his work in Antarctica, where he’s shown that there is far more microbial diversity than was initially suspected. A lot of his work has involved microbial life in extreme environments, see also when I accompanied him on a field trip to the Namib Desert.

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Quicklinks: 16-22 January 2023

Let’s start off with something cute; wolves playing in the snow.

Swapped an SD card on Saturday and realized we got some dynamite footage of the Nashata Pack! Here is a snippet for some Monday morning zen…enjoy a few moments of a couple wolves being wolves in a snowstorm! pic.twitter.com/ebZRdz5akQ

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) January 16, 2023

And here’s some good news for animals; New York became the 10^th US state to ban the sale of cosmetics which were tested on animals!

I’ve seen this in quite a few places, it’s a piece arguing that PhD training needs to be reformed. Now I’m not saying that PhD training (or universities in general) are perfect, they’re not. There are many things that can be improved but I don’t think this article is on the right track. In my opinion, many of the sort of issues that the article talks about are neither failings of PhD nor university education but a failure of society and expectations. A degree at any level is not supposed to prepare people for jobs. It’s supposed to provide domain-specific knowledge while building general skills in critical thinking, research and learning. It’s up to employers to provide job-specific training. There is also a problem of credential inflation where even basic jobs now require a degree, no matter how unnecessary that is. Furthermore, while I fully agree that we should value PhD graduates and that they can help find solutions to various problems, I think framing that as a key role of PhD training is sorely misguided. I say that because we don’t need more solutions! Look at the biggest problem of today – global warming. We already have renewable energy options, we know how to build public transport, we know how to make food more sustainable, we know we can cut back on consumption. The problems are not scientific, they are political. There is no political will to make the necessary changes. Most other big problems, from Russia’s war in Ukraine, censorship, human rights, equality and so on, those are all political problems that we can, in principle, solve today.

Quicklinks: 9-15 January 2023

I did not forget! I’m just slow.

This was a bit of a surprise for me! France’s longest land border is with… Brazil! This is all due to French Guiana.

friday geography quiz: who does france share its longest border with?

bet you weren’t gonna say brazil

ht @simongerman600 pic.twitter.com/T9NDxcN1sx

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) January 13, 2023

This is just a cool tweet about vivipary.

In plants, vivipary occurs when seeds or embryos begin to develop before they detach from the parent. These strawberries are an example: they're growing tiny green leaves from the seeds on their outer skin

[photos: https://t.co/LD27hdZ62E]
[read more: https://t.co/Pymmdzu07j] pic.twitter.com/ubV6xRopzC

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 9, 2023

I would like to see humans and animals coexisting peacefully, so I was heartened to read about this couple that decided to let a bear keep hibernating beneath their deck.

Structuring society to counteract science denialism

The essay below is my entry to the OeAW’s (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften/ Austrian Academy of Sciences) 2022 Preisfrage. The topic was “Fact or fiction: How to deal with scientific scepticism?”

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The problem of scientific scepticism, or, more accurately, science denialism, is a major one that has serious implications, particularly in modern society where so much is driven by scientific advances, and it is heartening that the Austrian Academy of Sciences has chosen it as a topic for this year’s Preisfrage. Before addressing the topic, I think it is necessary to clarify exactly what I do and don’t mean by certain terms to ensure that we all enter this discussion from the same starting point.

First, I will say that scepticism—questioning established knowledge—is good. Indeed, scepticism is a core principle of science itself. In science, all our knowledge is provisional, should be treated with scepticism and is accepted only to the extent that the current evidence supports it. However, the scientific scepticism that is of interest to the academy goes beyond this, to the extent that people, who lack the deep knowledge and training required to assess the evidence, doubt the scientific consensus in a manner that is disproportionate to the actual uncertainty of the conclusion. For this reason, I will not use the term scientific scepticism, which is a virtue that all scientists should share, and instead use science denialism which better captures that the problem is not scepticism itself but an unjustified denial of the scientific consensus.

A Mexican flag in America!

I’ve mentioned, quite a few times, on this blog that causing offence should not be a reason to limit someone’s speech. Just because someone takes offence at something doesn’t mean that it is offensive. That is quite clearly illustrated by a particularly bigoted woman in California.

Tressy Capps was so offended by a house flying a Mexican flag in the United States of America that she actually stopped her car, went up to the house and told them off. She called it disrespectful and that if the house wanted to fly the Mexican flag then they should move to Mexico! I hope for her sake that she never travels to New York because that’s where the headquarters of the United Nations is and there are 192 foreign flags flying proudly.

What about demographic representation?

South African politics can be amusing and it can also be surprising what upsets people. The new big controversy has been a cartoon published by Eye Witness News which has been condemned as racist. Even more ridiculous, the ANC actually claims the cartoon undermines the democratic process. Sure, it’s going to upset some people but it’s hardly undermining democracy.

Spying leftovers

Sorry for the sparse posting. I’ve been spending time with family and friends over the Christmas/New Year’s period. I was away for New Year’s with some of my family and am currently away again, staying with a friend. I will be home later this week and should then be able to start posting regularly again.

Over the past few months, I took note of a number of stories regarding how the US and UK were spying on essentially everyone. Many of them have already been posted (see here, here, here and here) but I still have a couple more that were not always focussed on the spying themselves or which were particularly interesting in light of the NSA’s actions. I’m posting all of them together here.

A step closer to internet right to privacy

The resolution for internet privacy, which I mentioned before, has been passed by UN rights committee and will now head to the UN General Assembly. This is a great step, which is why I’m giving it it’s own post, however, I want to express disappointment at one point.

The US and key allies Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand joined a consensus vote passing the resolution after language which suggested that foreign spying would be a rights violation was weakened.

All I hear there is some countries saying, “Foreigners don’t deserve the same rights as our citizens.” That attitude, that it’s acceptable to spy on other countries’ citizens but not your own, is a problem. That’s a xenophobic attitude. It shouldn’t matter where someone was born. Americans and Iraqis should share the same rights. It’s not okay that we allow governments to say that just because one lives in a foreign country that they don’t get a right to privacy.

Similarly, shouldn’t one be as outraged at passports as at the Apartheid pass laws? Both limit movement according to an arbitrary characteristics. The pass laws according to race and passports according to nationality. Why are country boundaries seen as something so real?