Russia trying to generate interest in Sochi Winter olympiic games?

Anna Sidorova

Anna Prugova

"Sochi strip: Female Russian Olympians pose in provocative photos"

by

Lisa Gutierrez

February 6th, 2014

The Kansas City Star

As if the news out of Sochi wasn’t weird enough – stray dogs being rounded up and killed, strangers walking into reporters’ hotel rooms, no fans there yet – now some of Russia’s female Olympians have stripped down to their undies in a set of controversial photos.

In what some are calling a “late-game” effort to get everyone excited about the games, women on Russia’s Olympic team posed for photos in provocative lingerie and skimpy dresses.

The photos show the women in what is described as a “more feminine” light.

The athletes who participated include curler Anna Sidorova, speed skater Tatiana Borodulina, figure skater Ekaterina Bobrova, freestyle skier Ekaterina Stolyarova and ice hockey goalie Anna Prugova.

Of course, the photos have gone viral in Russia, where one website boasts that “Russian sportswomen are the best campaigners for our team in Sochi.

“Our Russian Olympic team defies stereotype that women in sport are just a heap of muscles and masculine shapes.”
Because, you know, who wants to think of a woman as just a heap of muscles.

Yes, that was our snarky voice.

Leo Szilard's papers to be online

"UCSD to digitize Szilard papers"

by

Gary Robbins

February 5th, 2014

The San Diego Union-Tribune

UC San Diego's Geisel Library has received a grant of nearly $100,000 to digitize the papers and materials of Leo Szilard, the late physicist whose work on nuclear chain reactions helped lead to the Manhattan Project, the program that produced the country's first atomic bombs.

The library's Mandeville Special Collections has more than 50,000 items involving Szilard, who spent part of the 1950s as a consultant at General Atomics in San Diego before going on to become one of the first fellows at the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in La Jolla. Szilard, who had a deep interest in biology as well as physics, died in La Jolla in May 1964 at the age of 66.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission gave the grant to the University of California San Diego, whose library also houses major collections of papers from Nobel laureates Francis Crick, Harold Urey and Maria Goeppert Mayer, polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk, and children's author Theodor Seuss Geisel.

"The public is going to have access not only Szilard's creations, but to documents that show the process of that creation," said William Lanouette of San Diego, author of "Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb."

Lanouette will give a public speech about Szilard's life and career on March 5th at the UC San Diego Faculty Club, starting at 11 a.m.

Szilard changed the course of history in 1933 when he came up with the basic idea for nuclear chain reaction, which he later patented with physicist Enrico Fermi. Six years later, Szilard worked with Albert Einstein on a draft of a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that specified how the breakthrough might be used to develop nuclear weapons. A formal later was later sent to Roosevelt, leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

Szilard was a major behind-the-scenes contributor to the project. But he ended up lobbying the government hard against using atomic bombs against Japan, a campaign that proved to be unsuccessful.

Hawking...icon evaluation

"Hawking: Is He All He’s Cracked Up To Be?"

We all know that Stephen Hawking is the greatest living physicist—but what we all know may not be true

by

Michael D. Lemonick

February 3rd, 2014

Time

Partway through Hawking, a moving new PBS documentary on the life and work of British physicist Stephen Hawking, narrated via voice synthesizer by the man himself, Hawking raises a delicate point. “Sometimes I wonder,” he says, “If I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.” He never offers a definitive answer, but it seems pretty clear that the filmmakers think it’s mostly about the discoveries.

Sure, the backstory is poignant, and even amazing—diagnosed with the muscle-wasting condition known variously as ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease and, in the U.K., motor neurone disease, Hawking was given just two years to live. Yet a full half-century later, after a distinguished career at Cambridge, the 71-year-old scientist, now utterly paralyzed, is still hard at work trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.

But it’s the discoveries that really catapulted Hawking into the pantheon of physics greatness, right? Trapped in an increasingly useless body, he could, as Caltech physicist Kip Thorne says in the film “move at lightning speed through the universe, seeing things nobody else could see.” He is, as most of us know, the greatest physicist since Einstein.

Except that he isn’t. “Rubbish,” Hawking himself responded, when I posed this proposition to him during a 1993 interview. “It’s mere media hype.” It’s undeniable that Hawking has made key contributions to both relativity and quantum physics. He came up with the insight that the Big Bang emerged from a singularity, a point so small and dense that the very laws of physics can’t describe it. He figured out what happened when black holes merge. He also came up with the startling and counter-intuitive notion that black holes can evaporate, slowly at first, then faster and faster until they explode—an idea that was at first ridiculed, but which is now mainstream. “This result,” says Bernard Carr, one of Hawking’s former PhD students, “unified relativity and quantum theory and thermodynamics.”

That would be positively mind-blowing—if true. But it’s really not: the so-called “Hawking radiation” that should emerge from black holes draws on those disparate areas of physics, but “unify” means something else entirely. Unifying relativity and quantum physics is something Einstein tried to do for the last two decades of his life, and failed. The best bet for unification these days is string theory—assuming it turns out to be correct, which we may never know.

You can’t blame Hawking for that over-the-top quote, but Hawking himself talks about the honor he felt being inducted into the Royal Society. “My name,” he says “sat alongside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.” Well, yeah, and also along a lengthy list of other scientists you’ve never heard of.

Then there’s A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s mega-bestseller, first published in 1988. “I wanted the book to be read by millions of people around the world like a bestselling airport novel,” he says in the film. “I felt the mass market wanted to know how the universe began.” Fat chance, thought his agent and his publishers—but Brief History went on to sell millions upon millions of copies. The reason was that it explained some of the great mysteries of the cosmos in simple, digestible language. “It made this subject a topic of conversation among all walks of life,” says Caltech’s Thorne.

Surely you remember all those conversations. Or…maybe not. In fact, the book was nearly incomprehensible to people in all walks of life outside of theoretical physics. The real story, suggested Time book critic Paul Gray in a 2001 essay, is that “people buy a book for many reasons: either they want to read it, think they ought to read it, or want to impress people by making them think they have read it.” Whether they actually do read it is an entirely different question.

None of this should suggest that  Stephen Hawking is not one of the world’s leading physicists: he is, and would still be even if he were perfectly healthy. It’s the disability, though, and his fierce determination to carry on regardless, that makes the film so engaging and his life so uplifting—and perhaps makes people want to overstate his accomplishments. He is, one former student says, “the most stubborn person I know.”

Hawking chronicles that stubborn streak through Hawking’s own memories and through those of his sister, his first wife, and many, many colleagues. You don’t hear from his second wife, though: she was one of his former nurses, whom he ultimately divorced after 11 years of marriage amid scandalous rumors. “The press printed unsubstantiated allegations,” he says, “that I had been the victim of domestic violence. This was a gross invasion of our privacy.” (He doesn’t say, however, that it didn’t happen.)

The film is peppered with photos and videos of Hawking as a young boy, then a nerdy Oxford undergrad, then an increasingly disabled man who can now only twitch the muscles in his cheek to operate a computer and voice synthesizer. There’s also plenty of cheesy footage of actors recreating what Hawking might have looked like writing on a blackboard way back when—an unfortunate technique that’s now evidently de rigeur in historical documentaries.

You also see flashes of Hawking’s sense of humor. It shows in his willingness to spoof his own smartest-man-on-the-planet brand with appearances on The Simpsons and Star Trek, and with his collaboration with Jim Carrey on a stunt call while the comedian was on the air with David Letterman (“I’m watching Dumb and Dumber, Jim, and you’re a genius.” “No, Stephen, you’re a genius.” “No, Jim, you are”). He’s also pretty funny in real life. “It’s a pity,” he says to a huge audience at a public talk, “that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.” He delivers the line for laughs, and gets them.

And then there’s something that doesn’t make it into the film, but which I saw myself when I interviewed him in 1993. It was in Seattle, where he’d gone to give some talks, and his aide let it slip that whenever he traveled, he would ask his hosts to set up a meeting with local children with disabilities.

These visits were totally unpublicized, but I was lucky enough to go along and watch the pretty-great physicist answered questions from a half-dozen or so kids for an hour, their wheelchairs arrayed around his in a semicircle. That’s when I became convinced that even when you strip away the hype, Stephen Hawing may not be the world’s greatest living physicist—but he’s a pretty extraordinary human being.

Shopping ethics

"Sly shoppers' bag of tricks"

Some money-saving moves are outright fraud, but others are technically allowed. Much of the retail industry has been hesitant to push back.

by

Tiffany Hsu and Andrea Chang

February 2nd, 2014

latimes.com

Nordstrom is famously forgiving when shoppers change their minds about purchases.

Customers love it — especially those whose motives may be questionable. The Seattle retailer has been known to take back well-worn clothing, shoes bought years earlier and jars of half-used moisturizer.

When Elana Pruitt was a Nordstrom sales employee years ago, she recalled, shoppers would make purchases with gift cards and then quickly return the items for cash. Technically it's allowed, said Pruitt, 33, now a social media coordinator and fashion blogger in Eagle Rock. But she considers it "a bit tacky."

"We had a lot of really great, loyal customers," Pruitt said, "but because the store was so generous with its policies, it was totally taken advantage of."

These days, shoppers are playing faster and looser, experts say. Serial returners have been conditioned by a culture of retail discounting and tight economic times. And the Internet has opened up new opportunities for testing the limits of retail return policies.

At times, the activity amounts to flat-out fraud. Sham returns involving stolen merchandise, items bought with fake money and doctored e-receipts cost the industry $8.8 billion last year, affecting nearly 95% of retailers, according to the National Retail Federation.

But there's also a mushrooming undergrowth of not-quite scams and ethically hazy work-arounds — tricks that regular customers pull to save some money. Spending a minimum of $50 to get a freebie and then returning everything but the gift. Scouring aggregator websites for online coupon codes intended only for a retailer's email subscribers. When buying discounted items that are final sale, asking for a gift receipt just in case — that way, the product can be exchanged later for store credit.

"To me, it's stealing and it's unethical, but it's a gray area," Pruitt said. "I hate thinking that people next to me in line have agendas, but I'm sure they do."

Some consumers justify their tricky tactics as a necessity in a shaky economy or simply as smart shopping. Others call it a form of retail Robin Hooding — retailers, they say, overcharge for products, and those bloated corporations wouldn't miss a few extra dollars, right? And there are those for whom wriggling through the loopholes in a return policy heightens the thrill of a bargain hunt.

And shopping with subterfuge is getting easier as more consumers go online.

In the wilderness of e-commerce, which sprawls across computers, smartphones and tablets, shoppers have birthed new ways to game the retail system. They can namelessly swap deal-hunting tips on shopper forums and plug in multiple dates to repeatedly tap birthday promotions, among other ploys.

"Consumers are savvier and smarter than they've ever been before," said Matthew Ong, senior retail analyst at online personal finance company NerdWallet Inc. "There's so much more information available — they're talking to hundreds, thousands of other people."

Retailers are playing directly into some of the schemes.

Many offer special deals to first-time shoppers or customers who sign up for email lists, hoping to establish a database of information to help with targeted advertising. But anyone with multiple throwaway email accounts can take advantage of such promotions more than once.

Stores also are flinging deals at shoppers to encourage more digital purchasing. Buy one, get one free! Spend $25, get shipping on the house! Freeloaders will exceed the minimum spending threshold online, get hold of the giveaways and then mail back the rest of the haul, never showing their faces.

"The Internet provides anonymity," Ong said. "You can hide behind your purchases in a way you can't at the checkout counter at the store."

But some retailers are finding ways to block sly shoppers.

Online coupon aggregator RetailMeNot said it monitors coupon redemption from users and is in constant contact with retailers such as Macy's and Best Buy. The company said it tightened the rules for what kinds of codes can be listed by users, whose submissions make up a third of the roughly 500,000 codes in the RetailMeNot database.

Nearly three-quarters of retailers now require customers returning items with no receipt to show identification; 12.3% mandate ID even with a receipt — both up from 2012, according to the National Retail Federation.

Starting last year, dresses priced at $150 or more at Bloomingdale's are tagged with visible black plastic markers that, once removed, prevent the item from being returned.

REI plans to begin applying an updated return policy in June, requiring customers to bring back merchandise within a year of purchase instead of allowing them the lifetime of the product to change their minds.

The sporting goods chain said it's making the switch because of a rising rate of returns that "stretched beyond the original intent of the policy, financial impact to REI and the policies of leading retailers."

Increasingly, retailers are also profiling their customers, training extra eyes and employing algorithms to identify problem customers, email addresses or devices, said Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner.

"If you aren't investing in security and anti-fraud, you're not going to be successful; your entire profit margin would be eaten away," Litan said. "It can be a make-or-break situation."

Retailers are turning to services that track returns made without a receipt, then forbidding flagged customers from making receipt-free returns for a probationary period. Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes said that doing so enables the retailer to "identify patterns, connecting returns to store credits and building out a pattern of abuse and then taking action on that."

The practice, dubbed blacklisting, has become more common in recent years, said Edgar Dworsky, who runs the Consumer World informational service.

More companies are also "slicing and dicing" their return policies, Dworsky said. Instead of a single deadline, stores such as Sears, Wal-Mart and Target now have different return cutoff dates for various product categories — 90 days for clothing returns but only 30 for appliances, for example.

Among online retailers, particularly smaller companies, fees for restocking non-defective returns are popular. Traditional stores do it too. Home Depot employs a restocking fee for certain big-ticket items. Holmes said customers have been known to buy generators before major storms and then try to return them after the bad weather passes.

But much of the retail industry has been hesitant to fight back.

Cracking down on customers would suggest mistrust, a dangerous implication for the cutthroat industry. Besides, many merchants reason, questionable behavior isn't severe enough to be prosecuted. Companies don't mind dealing with a few retail ruffians in order to appear accommodating to the majority of shoppers.

"We deal fairly with our customers and believe they are fair with us," Nordstrom spokesman John Bailey said. "It's about creating a relationship with a customer for the long term."

Many chains keep their return policies loose, and some are even relaxing them.

Best Buy scrapped its 10% to 15% restocking fee on most products in 2010. Macy's used to have a 180-day limit on returns; now it's unlimited with a receipt. And even without proof of purchase, Macy's will give store credit for the item's lowest selling price within the last six months.

Others accept behavior such as "wardrobing" — in which customers buy an item, use it and then return it — as a hazard of doing business. Some 62% of retailers told the National Retail Federation that they experienced that switcheroo last year. Online, as many as one-third of items purchased are returned, according to retail consultancy Kurt Salmon.

"It's an overall benefit for retailers — they'd rather allow customers to treat their homes as a dressing room if it means people will buy more," Kurt Salmon analyst Michelle Bogan said.

Savvy shoppers say that so long as there are generous policies or loopholes, they'll continue to look for ways to take advantage of them.

Paul Weiskel, 24, a political science student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, bought a pair of hiking boots from L.L.Bean about six years ago. He wore them regularly until last summer, when "they basically just disintegrated on my feet." Rather than toss them in the trash, he said, he took the boots back to the store without a receipt and got a $100 gift certificate.

Another trick: When Amazon.com doesn't deliver two-day-shipping purchases on time, he calls the online giant for a $15 credit.

"I think it's perfectly, perfectly fine," Weiskel said. "Most corporations, they have no problems taking advantage of consumers or workers for profit, so whenever a consumer can get a little more bang for their buck, I'm 100% for that."

$#@#$$%%^ Punxsutawney Phil

Skin and quarter your Wood Chuck and par boil him in salted water for 20-30 min.

chop and render 4 slices of Bacon.
add quartered wood Chuck.
1 Lg. Onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 Lg. carrot, chopped
2 Bay Leaves

When Onion is translucent add,
1 can of BEER
1 cup of chicken stock
water if needed
Bring to a boil,cover, reduce heat, simmer 2-2.5 hrs.

Remove from heat, let cool, pull meat from bones and return pot to stove,
Add meat,
1 cup frozen or fresh peas
6 Lg. Mushrooms, sliced.
S+P to taste
Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 min. until done.

Garnish with shredded Cheddar and Chives.

"More winter! Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil sees shadow"

by

Doyle Rice

February 2nd, 2014

USA TODAY

Punxsutawney Phil, the world's most famous fuzzy forecaster, popped out of his burrow Sunday morning and predicted six more weeks of winter, much to the disappointment of the crowd gathered at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pa.

According to folklore, if it's cloudy when the groundhog emerges, the critter will leave his burrow, signifying that winter will soon end. If it's a sunny day, Phil will supposedly see his shadow and, frightened, retreat back into his burrow, and winter will continue for six more weeks.

Phil emerged at 7:28 a.m. ET to the cheers of thousands of cheering fans who braved temperatures in the 30s to hear his prediction. Many wore knitted hats in the shape of groundhogs or had groundhog paw marks painted on their cheeks.

Phil was brought to the podium by a group of local dignitaries known as the Inner Circle, all men clad in top hats and old-fashioned black frock coats. It was the 128th time Punxsutawney Phil had made his prediction.

Punxsutawney is pronounced "Punk-sit-taw-nee."

The Inner Circle brought out two scrolls, one predicting six more weeks of winter, one predicting spring around the corner. The crowd then chanted "Phil! Phil! Phil!" to wake him up.

The Inner Circle knocked on his burrow, and he was brought out to a cheering crowd. Phil spoke in "groundhogese" to the Inner Circle and directed its president, Bill Deeley, to translate for him. Put into English, his prediction was:

"A Super Bowl winner I will not predict,

but my weather forecast you cannot contradict.

Why that's not a football but my shadow I see,

It's six more weeks of winter it must be!"

Despite the hoopla and festival atmosphere in Punxsutawney, Pa., an analysis of weather data from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., shows that Phil's forecasts are, on average, inaccurate.

"The groundhog has shown no talent for predicting the arrival of spring, especially in recent years," according to the center. "Phil's competitor groundhogs across the nation fared no better."

The center found that from 1988 to 2012, the groundhog was right 10 times and wrong 15 times. In other words, 10 times, the national average temperature for the remainder of February matched what would be expected based on what the groundhog predicted.

Last year, the furry rodent, also known as a woodchuck, did not see his shadow, so there should have been an early spring. Phil gets a mixed grade last year — the nation had a slightly warmer than average February but a chillier than average March.

Since 1887, the groundhog has seen his shadow 100 times (meaning six more weeks of winter), and not seen it 17 times to predict an early spring. There is no record of the prediction for nine years in the late 19th century.

Although Phil is the most famous hog of them all, other prognosticating groundhogs include West Virginia's French Creek Freddie, Georgia's Gen. Beauregard Lee, Ohio's Buckeye Chuck, North Carolina's Sir Wally Wally, Alabama's Smith Lake Jake and New York's Staten Island Chuck (full name: Charles G. Hogg).

Groundhog Day has its origins in an ancient celebration of Candlemas, a point midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, according to the climate center.

Superstition has it that fair weather was seen as a prediction of a stormy and cold second half to winter, as noted in this Old English saying:

"If Candlemas be fair and bright,

Winter has another flight.

If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,

Winter will not come again."

Groundhog Day [Wikipedia]

Punxsutawney Phil [Wikipedia]

Charm of the Nazi body politic

Heinrich Himmler with His Daughter Gudrun

"‘Heini’ Himmler: When Nazis Play Cute"

A new trove of letters from an architect of the Holocaust and a new scientific study shed light on the roots of hate

by

Jeffrey Kluger

January 27th, 2014

Time

Let’s be honest, there’s something about Nazis that makes them impossible to ignore. Those boots, those salutes, that deeply creepy goosestep. And then of course there’s the small matter of their unspeakable evil. Murdering 11 million people—six million of them for their religion alone—makes you unique among history’s monster states. But what about the individual monsters themselves?

The architects of the Holocaust long go achieved a sort of undifferentiated, single-name infamy—Eichmann, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels—all of them evil, all accursed, all deservedly so. But there’s also the fact that most of them were family men, strivers climbing the career ladder and bringing home paychecks to a wife and children whom they told themselves they loved—and they probably did.

It’s that duality—the man who can dote on a cherished handful, then go to the work murdering millions of others—that has always mystified us the most. The just-released cache of correspondence between Heinrich Himmler—the Reichsführer responsible for building the concentration camps—and his wife and daughter, has raised the mystery of this aspect of human behavior anew. Coincidentally, on the same day the news of the Himmler letters went wide, investigators at SISSA-International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, have released the results of an experiment that may help explain it.

The sound-bites from the Himmler letters are jaw-dropping. There are the 150 tulips he sent his wife Margarete and their daughter from Holland, which his Nazis had only two years earlier terrorized and conquered. “Striped, jagged, two-color, one-color. The kind you cannot find [in Germany],” he wrote attentively. There are his regular updates on his important work, expressed with a chilling pride and nonchalance: “From Saturday until Tuesday I’ll be in a killing field to test new and interesting methods of shooting.” And there’s his affectionate farewell as he embarks on a business trip to a place that has become synonymous with the very essence of evil: “I’m off to Auschwitz. Kisses, Yours, Heini.”

Ethicists, morality researchers, historians and more have done as good a job as possible explaining how people who manifestly care for their own families can so easily slaughter members of other people’s. It begins by dehumanizing the group to be eradicated so that the act feels more like pest control than genocide. And so the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats in their propaganda films and the Hutus labeled the Tutsis “cockroaches” during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Even history’s good guys—the Allied nations in the Second World War, for example—are capable of that. Hitler and Mussolini were caricatured as cartoonishly evil in American propaganda posters. The Japanese, however, were drawn as yellow-faced, fang-toothed and claw-handed—when they weren’t simply depicted as monkeys.

But the Allies weren’t looking to exterminate all of the Japanese, Italians or Germans, while the Nazis had just that fate in mind for the Jews and other undesirables. In this, Himmler and his wife were aided by another tool of the actively evil: mutual validation. Humans do appear to have an innate sense of right and wrong—what researchers call “moral grammar”—and it’s with us from birth. Hatred and bigotry require that that impulse be beaten back, and cultural reinforcement helps. There’s a reason American racism is more common in the South which, even now, has more pockets that serve as echo chambers for bigotry than the North does. The more social opprobrium the racist feels, the faster hatred can be choked off. The Himmlers pumped plenty of fresh oxygen to their mutual antisemitism.

As early as 1928, Heinrich wrote to Margarete, who was trying to sell her share of a health clinic to a Jewish co-owner of the same building: “You have to fight with these wretched Jews because of the money. Don’t get frustrated over the Jews good lady—if only I could help you.”

A decade later, after Kristallnacht—the Nazi-sponsored looting and destruction of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues—Margarete wrote to Himmler, “This thing with the Jews. When will this scum leave us so that we can lead a happy life?”

The Himmlers even seemed to revel in a shared sense of what they saw as their impetuous wickedness. “I am so lucky to have a bad husband who loves his bad wife,” she wrote. Himmler responded, “There’s nothing other than ‘revenge.’ Forever.” Margarete then upped the evil ante. “My black soul is thinking about the most impossible things.” In a measure of the slipperiness of language, the German word Margarete used in describing them both as “bad” was “böse,” which can also mean naughty, misbehaved or, less commonly, evil. The U.K.’s Daily Mail, in its reports on the letters, used the “bad” translation. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot went for the full “evil.” Either way, the Himmlers hardly come out looking good.

The new Italian study explains—at least a little—the roots of their awfulness by looking at how the brain processes individuals versus groups. As long ago as 1984, neuroscientists began documenting the fact that people suffering from brain damage or dementia may have trouble categorizing nouns that belong in the category of either animate or inanimate things. Often, they did much better with one category—reliably identifying plants, animals and humans as animate, say—while struggling with the inanimate. Since damage can be particular to certain parts of the brain, this suggested that the two concepts are also processed in certain regions.

In the new study, the Italian researchers recruited a group of 21 subjects with varying stages of either fronto-temporal dementia or Alzheimer’s type dementia—which are specific to different areas of the brain—as well as a group of healthy control studies. The subjects were asked to make distinctions among three categories: the nonliving (including beds, forks, windows and hats), the living (including monkeys, onions, butterflies and horses) and groups (including gypsies, Jews, criminals and the disabled—all Nazi targets).

Across the board, the subjects with some form of dementia performed less well than the healthy, but there was no uniformity in the particular categories on which they did well or poorly. Without brain scans, it’s impossible to know which portions of the brain were responsible for the deficits, but one patient who had trouble with social categories was already known to have frontal temporal dementia, with the damage localized to the left hemisphere, so perhaps that is the spot that plays the biggest role.

None of this is remotely to suggest that the Himmlers—nor any of the other authors or enablers of the Holocaust—either suffered from brain damage or could blame their hate on physiological functions beyond their control. Instead, it seems the brain is, for better or worse, what one morality researcher calls a “meaning-making machine” and that it’s hardwired to make all manner of value judgments, including judgments concerning whole groups of people. Through circumstances, surroundings and our own disreputable choices, we may sometimes make hateful judgments. The Himmlers and their ilk were history’s grotesqueries. But all of us, like it or not, have the same brains—and the same capabilities.

Monarch butterflys...disappearing?

"Is the annual Monarch butterfly migration coming to an end?"

The number of black-and-orange butterflies, popularly known as Monarch butterflies, wintering in Mexico have hit its lowest this year since studies began in 1993. The insects' annual migration is on the verge of disappearing, say experts.

by

Mark Stevenson

January 29th, 2014

Associated Press

The number of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico plunged this year to its lowest level since studies began in 1993, leading experts to announce Wednesday that the insects' annual migration from the United States and Canada is in danger of disappearing.

A report released by the World Wildlife Fund, Mexico's Environment Department and the Natural Protected Areas Commission blames the displacement of milkweed, the butterflies' primary food source, by genetically modified crops and urban sprawl in the United States, as well as the dramatic reduction of the butterflies' habitat in Mexico due to illegal logging of the trees they depend on for shelter.

After steep and steady declines in the previous three years, the black-and-orange butterflies now cover only 1.65 acres (0.67 hectares) in the pine and fir forests west of Mexico City, compared to 2.93 acres (1.19 hectares) last year. They covered more than 44.5 acres (18 hectares) at their recorded peak in 1995.

Because the butterflies clump together by the thousands in trees, they are counted by the area they cover.

The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, experts say.

The announcement followed on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which saw the United States, Mexico and Canada signing environmental accords to protect migratory species such as the Monarch. At the time, the butterfly was adopted as the symbol of trilateral cooperation.

"Twenty years after the signing of NAFTA, the Monarch migration, the symbol of the three countries' cooperation, is at serious risk of disappearing," said Omar Vidal, the World Wildlife Fund director in Mexico.

Lincoln Brower, a leading entomologist at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, wrote that "the migration is definitely proving to be an endangered biological phenomenon."

"The main culprit is now GMO herbicide-resistant corn and soybean crops and herbicides in the USA," which "leads to the wholesale killing of the monarch's principal food plant, common milkweed," Dr. Brower wrote in an email.

While Mexico has made headway in reducing logging in the officially protected winter reserve, that alone cannot save the migration, wrote Karen Oberhauser, a professor at the University of Minnesota. She noted that studies indicate that the U.S. Midwest is the main source of the butterflies coming to Mexico. "A large part of their reproductive habitat in that region has been lost due to changes in agricultural practices, mainly the explosive growth in the use of herbicide-tolerant crops."

While some gardeners and activists in the United States have started a movement to plant small patches of milkweed, the effort is in its infancy. Extreme weather — extreme cold snaps, unusually heavy rains or droughts in all three countries — have also apparently played a role in the decline.

It's unclear what would happen to the Monarchs if they no longer migrated. The butterflies can apparently survive year-round in warmer climates, but populations in the northern United States and Canada would have to face bitter winters. There is also another small migration route that takes the butterflies to California, but that has also registered declines.

The migration is an inherited trait. No butterfly lives to make the full round-trip, and it is unclear how they remember the route back to the same patch of forest each year, a journey of thousands of miles to a forest reserve that covers 193,000 acres (56,259-hectares) in central Mexico.

Inhabitants of the reserve had already noted a historic change, as early as the Nov. 1-2 Day of the Dead holiday, when the butterflies usually arrive.

"They were part of the landscape of the Day of the Dead, when you could see them flitting around the graveyards," said Gloria Tavera, the director of the reserve. "This year was the first time in memory that they weren't there."
Losing the butterflies would be a blow for people such as Adolfo Rivera, 55, a farmer from the town of Los Saucos who works as a guide for tourists in the Piedra Herrada wintering ground. He said the butterflies had come later and in smaller numbers this year, a fact he attributed to a rainy winter. "This is a source of pride for us, and income," Rivera said.

Butterfly guide Emilio Velazquez Moreno, 39, and other farmers in the village of Macheros, located inside the reserve, have been planting small plots of milkweed in a bid to provide food for the Monarchs if they decide to stay in Mexico year-round, which he said some do.

Sitting beside a mountainside patch of firs where the butterflies were clumping on the branches, Velazquez Moreno, a second-generation guide who has been visiting the butterflies since he was a boy, says, "We have to protect this. This comes first, this is our heritage."

Monarch butterfly [Wikipedia]