World War I to end Sunday

Here's something I didn't know: Germany is about to make its final payment on the reparations debts which were imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Sunday's sum is the final payment on interest accrued between 1945 and 1952 on foreign bonds the German government had issued between the two world wars to raise capital for Treaty of Versailles payments. The money Germany pays on Sunday will therefore actually go to private investors who own these bonds.

The actual reparations payments themselves were finished in 1983. Under the London Agreement on German External Debts, signed by then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1953, Germany was excused from paying off the €125 million in interest on the bonds until after the country was reunified.

Why Google Scholar makes me roll my eyes

Here's part of the latest Google Scholar alert I received for scholarly articles on "Yellowstone National Park." Note the authors:


B. Bear, M. Lions, P. Safety, and E.E. Home (that is, the home page for the Encyclopedia of the Earth). Add the fact that none of those sites is "scholarly," unless you're writing a report for middle school. I still use Google Scholar for passive searches, or to look for particularly obscure citations. But as a discovery tool, they have a long way to go.

Heroes in their own minds

Have you ever seen one of those adolescent males, maybe 20 years old, who loves The Matrix too much? He's the guy who has gotten it into his head that if he just drapes his too-skinny or too-pudgy body in a full-length leather coat ... why, then surely he looks just like Keanu Reeves and can date Carrie-Anne Moss.

That was rather my impression of the GOP's new Pledge to America. Because it reeks of the same self-delusions as this guy:


Look, we all have our Walter Mitty moments, seeing ourselves as the protagonist of some heroic, secret fantasy. Most of us are smart enough to do what Mitty did - keep it secret. When you go public, like our dorky adolescent Neo's, you just look ridiculous.

So, regarding that Pledge. The one that -- betcha didn't see this coming -- promises to cut taxes, raise defense spending, protect Medicare, and balance the budget all at the same time; the one that promises to cut Congress's budget while simultaneously reviewing each and every regulation issued by the Executive Department; the one that shockingly reveals that government spending in nominal dollars has doubled since 1980*; the one which shamelessly claims that the Republicans balanced the budget in the 1990s. The one whose photographs portray an America which is 99.5% white.

That Pledge. The one which clumsily tries to evoke the Declaration of Independence by opening with:

America is an idea – an idea that free people can govern themselves, that government’s powers are derived from the consent of the governed, that each of us is endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. America is the belief that any man or woman can – given economic, political, and religious liberty – advance themselves, their families, and the common good.

America is an inspiration to those who yearn to be free and have the ability and the dignity to determine their own destiny.

Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.

Okay, so the GOP has no one who can write like Thomas Jefferson. Who does anymore? But "institute a new governing agenda and set a different course"? How do you get from the ringing challenge of "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” to the mewling "institute a new governing agenda"?

You get there by indulging your fantasies of 1775, even while recognizing that the comparison is just beyond ridiculous. Even for the people who can write the absurdities above (only a bare sample, I assure you), the Declaration is an embarrassment to them, because they simply are not oppressed the way their ancestors were.

Oh, they feel oppressed, no doubt about it. And they certainly do imagine themselves as modern day Sam Adamses and Paul Reveres, bravely standing up to tyranny. But when they begin to state the causes of their discontent, the truth is so embarrassing that they have to scramble and scratch for some formulation that won’t invite, no, demand ridicule.

The colonists famously rebelled against “taxation without representation.” Our GOP revolts against losing free and fair elections. They dream of themselves as heroic Sons of Liberty, bravely pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor against a tyrannical government; in reality, they whine because they don’t get their way every time. But they can't say that out lod. So they tell this lie instead:

An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many.

Alas, that mouse doesn't roar. Not one member of Congress is self-appointed. Not a single one can maintain his seat against the will of the majority. That's why the Pledge uses the word many: because saying majority would give the game away. The truth is that they not only have the right to institute a new governing agenda, they also have the means to do so. All they have to do is win an election. Last time they lost; this time out they’re likely to win. That’s democracy, not tyranny.

The GOP and the Tea Partiers don't share the grievances of the colonial rebels -- they get to vote for the people who tax them. The Sons of Liberty didn’t have representatives in Parliament; if they didn't like the British government which ruled them, the SoL were SOL. The Tea Partiers are just Sore Losers. Which is why, when they try to dress themselves as heroes, they look like adolescent dorks instead.


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*That works out to 2.5% growth per year, which compares well with the average inflation rate of 3.3% over the same period (calculated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics's CPI Inflation Calcualtor)

Friday photo

Ravens raiding snowmobiles, Yellowstone National Park. January 2001.

Ravens are smart, and one is tempted to say they may be smarter than people. Or at least smarter than snowmobilers, which any Yellowstone XC skier will tell you sets the bar somewhat lower. In any event, the snowmobilers who come into Old Faithful during the winter have a difficult task protecting their lunches from the ravens. If you think keeping your backpack zipped is sufficient, you're likely to go hungry on the way home. Carefully fastened buckles can slow them down, but not for long: they've figured out how to open those, too.

Think about that achievement for a moment. How many dogs or cats, with careful training, do you suppose could learn to unfasten a buckle? Not many, if any, I would venture. Ravens, on the other hand, can work it out on their own.

How clever are ravens? In his wonderful book Mind of the Raven, the biologist Bernd Heinrich describes an experiment he conducted. What he did was this: he attached a piece of food to the end of a string, a little over two feet long, and hung it from a horizontal bar. The raven could stand on the bar, but couldn't reach the food from any available perch. By using a piece of hard salami, Heinrich also guaranteed that the bird could not tear off a piece while in flight. His problem was to figure out how to get the food within reach of his bill.

The only way to succeed was for the bird to reach down below the perch, grab the string and raise it above the perch, then -- and here's where it gets particularly tricky -- pin this loop of string against the perch with his foot, release the loop from his bill, reach down, and repeat the procedure until the morsel came into reach. Could a raven figure all that out?

The first day, they struggled some with the string and quickly gave up. The next day Heinrich put out the food again, in the same arrangement, and the first raven that tried it performed the entire procedure on his first attempt. It was no fluke:the raven had figured it all out and could repeat it every time thereafter. Other ravens got it right the first time, and the initial failure seems to have owed more to the birds being spooked by a weird and unfamiliar arrangement than with being stumped over what to do with it.

Once a biologist has some success with an experiment, he's likely to create many variations on the theme and Heinrich did exactly that. He put up two strings, one holding food and the other suspending a rock; that didn't take long to figure out. Then he crossed the strings: to get the food, a bird would have to stand over the rock and pull the nearest string. They could figure this out, too, but they it always gave them trouble: most of them would test the string above the food, see the rock jiggle, and then move to the other string. Heinrich, perhaps surprisingly, takes this as evidence that they were thinking and not just responding to positive conditioning: "[C]onsciousness of what they thought they knew* took precedence over trial-and-error learning, which was glacially slow even for this one extremely simple task."

It's a bold claim, because what Heinrich is saying is that the ravens weren't plucking the first string just out of habit; they plucked it because they had a mental concept of how the game worked and they had a hard time letting go of it - otherwise, they'd have learned the new system much easier.

To test this hypothesis, Heinrich next placed a rock on a familiar piece of string, and hung the food from a brand-new string, one of a different color, thickness, or texture than the birds had seen before. Had they been conditioned like mice pressing a button to get a reward, the ravens would have tested the most familiar string first; but that's not what happened. Instead, they always went for the novel string attached to the food and ignored the familiar-looking string. The fact that the old string was associated with past success did not impress them as you might think. This time, their mental concepts were leading them to the correct solution.

Clever birds. Clever experimenter, too, and a good writer. I highly recommend Heinrich's books ( Mind of the Raven and Ravens in Winter).



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* These were birds who had already solved the one-string problem, in case that wasn't clear.

A pox am I

Have you ever wondered what sort of protein you would be, if the letters in your name corresponded to amino acids? Of course you didn't; only a complete geek would wonder something like that.

So a f(r)iend threw my name into this Name-to-DNA translator and, well, here are the results:


The highlighted portion reads: "This protein is found in the species Camelpox virus (strain CMS)."

So be nice to me or I'll make your camel sick.