And more reptilian strangeness

Again, from the BBC:

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park. . .

Burmese pythons - many of whom have been dumped by their owners - have thrived in the wet and hot climate of Florida's swamps over the past 20 years.

Crocodile hunters

I've got to get a look at this:

A BBC crew managed to film over 40 of the huge beasts gathering and working together to feast on fish migrating up the Mary River in Australia.

This cooperative feeding behaviour has only recently been discovered - saltwater crocodiles are usually highly territorial creatures.

The animals were filmed with the help of infrared cameras because the spectacle took place during the night.

It's raining, it's snowing, the microbes are nucleating

The sky is not an ethereal, sterile realm. It's teeming with bacteria, and scientists say that the microbes play a powerful role in producing rain and snow.

While the idea that bacteria could prompt precipitation was previously known, a paper published this week in Science shows that they're more important than anyone expected.

With obvious ramifications for modeling climate change:

The findings raise the question of how climate change and human activities will affect bacterial balances in the sky.

From Wired.

Quotation of the day

Cutting to the quick:

"Cal Poly wants to open a male-only engineering program at a university in Saudi Arabia." Would they have opened a whites-only engineering school in the old South Africa?

Glenn Reynolds said it, referencing Joanne Jacobs on the original LA Times article.

Giant plesiosaurs

A fossilised "sea monster" unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.

The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006.

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil "treasure trove" uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed "The Monster", the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

From the BBC. But watch out: more discoveries are occurring all the time:

The discovery of another large pliosaur was announced in 2002. Known as the "Monster of Aramberri" after the site in north-eastern Mexico where it was dug up, the creature could be just as big as the Svalbard specimen, according to the team that found it.

Another depressing student survey

Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic questions about history and literature during a recent telephone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.

The results of the survey, released Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of American teenagers live in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature, according to the group that commissioned it. . .

About a quarter of the teenagers surveyed were unable to correctly identify Adolf Hitler as Germany's chancellor during World War II, instead identifying him variously as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German Kaiser.

On literature, the teenagers fared even worse. Only four in 10 could pick the name of Ralph Ellison's novel about a young man's growing up in the south and moving to Harlem, "Invisible Man," from a list of titles, and only about half knew that in the Bible, Job is known for his patience in suffering. About as many said he was known for his skill as a builder, or his prowess in battle, or his prophetic abilities.

From today's NY Times. Full text of the report available here. Interestingly, the NYT article focuses on the claim that knowledge of history and literature is suffering thanks to No Child Left Behind and teaching to tests that only cover reading and mathematics, while passing over the report's concern for the underperformance of students whose parents have no college education.

Yale blasted over Machu Picchu footdragging

Looked like the dispute was settled, but it seems Yale still won't concede the central and indisputable point: the Peruvian treasures it has been holding were never given up by Peru, only allowed out on a loan that should have been concluded decades ago. Read about it in the New York Times.

Reading between the tesserae

What the Magerius mosaic tells us about Roman entertainment: leopards, blood, and money.

Gun buyback foolishness

I happened to be in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago, where I read the praises sung of the gun buyback that had just taken place in crime-ravaged Oakland. The local news outlets hadn't a bad word to say, even though it seemed clear to me that the main effect of offering $250 per gun would be to throw away funds desperately needed for law enforcement, enriching opportunistic gun traders turning in weapons that are worn out, unserviceable, and unsalable.

Sure enough, a subsequent wave of articles spells it out. The Oakland Tribune, for example:

Dealers from as far away as Reno and Fresno turned up to dump their unsold merchandise.

The first two people in line at Christian Cathedral, one of the three exchange locations, were gun dealers with 60 firearms in the trunk. Some guns turned in still had price tags on them.

Event organizers quickly instituted a five-gun limit. But why hadn't anyone thought to set an individual maximum from the get-go? And, if the purpose was to get guns off of the streets of Oakland, why didn't officials require that sellers be local residents?

Within a couple of hours, police had run through the $80,000 that Perata had raised from private donors.

Yet there were still hordes of people who'd been waiting for hours. Rather than send them away, Chief Tucker decided to give them vouchers.

Now, the cash-strapped police department has to cough up $170,000 to pay those who got left out in the cold over the weekend.

Police officials say they may ask the City Council and Perata -- who engineered the fiasco -- to make up the shortfall.

Economist Alex Tabarrok also comments:

The buyback has been criticized as a poorly organized fiasco, but even the critics say it was "the right idea" and "a step in the right direction."

On the contrary, the buyback was a bad idea from the beginning. Gun buybacks have been tried before, in cities from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and they simply don't work.

In an authoritative study, the National Academy of Sciences reported that "the theory underlying gun buy-back programs is badly flawed and the empirical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these programs". . .

One wonders why the police even bothered to buy the guns from Oakland residents. Why not buy directly from gun manufacturers? . . .

There are 150 to 200 million guns in the United States, so there are plenty of low-quality guns to be sold. An Oakland gun buyback is like trying to drain the Pacific -- every bucket of water you take out is instantly replaced. Even large gun-buyback programs are unlikely to have significant effects. Australia spent half a billion dollars buying guns, with no significant effect on homicides by firearm.

Tabarrok's blog entry on the subject is here. I've heard the argument that buybacks are important as symbolic gestures, but this doesn't seem especially convincing when real money is being spent and real results are needed.

Female Spitfire pilot recognized

A woman pilot who was among those who flew replacement fighters to RAF bases during World War II has spoken of her joy at the recognition for her work.

Margaret Frost, 87, is one of 15 women and 100 men who are to have a special merit award for serving in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA).

The parson's daughter from Bwlchllan, near Lampeter, west Wales, flew Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs.

The need for pilots was desperate back then:

Ms Frost won her wings in 1938, after just 15 hours in the air, only five of them solo.

She was rejected by the ATA when she volunteered after war broke out because she was just under the 5ft 4in (1.62m) height requirement and was considered too inexperienced.

A few years later, they were knocking on her door. From the BBC.

Born in the Year of the . . . ?

I've been traveling recently, hence the lack of posts. Did have a new small notebook to bring along, but somehow spending time with the family managed to edge out blogging . . . .

Tomorrow is back to school day for the kids; one of the homework assignments involved the Chinese calendar and identifying in what animal year you were born. We have a lot of early January birthdays here, so it struck me that we would also have some misidentifications thanks to the gap between January 1st and the beginning of Chinese New Year. Wikipedia confirms it -- so now my eldest can go to school and lecture her class on the lunisolar calendar.