So a few days ago I posted about newts, and I mentioned that there was an American newt that was ridiculously toxic. But then (I said) there wasn’t space or time to go into why. And of course I was immediately bombarded by many* comments and e-mails asking why.
*three
Well, fine. The world’s most toxic newt is Taricha granulosa, the Rough-Skinned Newt, a modest little amphibian native to the North American Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades from around Santa Cruz, CA up to the Alaska Panhandle.
It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.
(But note that the newt is toxic, not venomous. It doesn’t bite or sting. You could handle one safely, as long as you washed your hands thoroughly afterwards. Very, very thoroughly.)
Okay, but… why? Lots of newts are mildly toxic. Why is this particularly newt so extremely toxic?
Turns out this is a fairly deep rabbit hole! I’ll try to teal deer it.
[click to continue…]
So a few days ago I posted about newts, and I mentioned that there was an American newt that was ridiculously toxic. But then (I said) there wasn’t space or time to go into why. And of course I was immediately bombarded by many* comments and e-mails asking why.
*three
Well, fine. The world’s most toxic newt is Taricha granulosa, the Rough-Skinned Newt, a modest little amphibian native to the North American Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades from around Santa Cruz, CA up to the Alaska Panhandle.
It’s so toxic that the poison from a single newt can easily kill several adult humans. You could literally die from licking this newt, just once.
(But note that the newt is toxic, not venomous. It doesn’t bite or sting. You could handle one safely, as long as you washed your hands thoroughly afterwards. Very, very thoroughly.)
Okay, but… why? Lots of newts are mildly toxic. Why is this particularly newt so extremely toxic?
Turns out this is a fairly deep rabbit hole! I’ll try to teal deer it.
[click to continue…]
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But perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy.—David Hume History of England, 23.34
The modern university is in a grave crisis in today’s imperial core. During a crisis it is instructive to return to one’s foundation and, thereby, reorient oneself. That foundation is Authentica habita, dating from 1155.[1] It was promulgated by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190), also known as Frederick I. This document had legal status throughout the Holy Roman Empire (it is known to us because it was included in new editions of the Justinian Code then recently rediscovered in the West.)
Authentica habita document was elicited by learned lawyers at Bologna. When they did so there was as-of-yet no corporate body organized as a university in Bologna, although we have good reason to believe that the town was already known for “the doctors of law and other masters staying there.” (Koeppler 1939: 593) Universities as corporate bodies with guild-like characteristics developed over a century later from them.[2]
Crucially, the practices made possible by Authentica habita shaped the articles of incorporation of these subsequent institutions. I will, thus, use it anachronistically to help conceptualize the framework for the privileges associated with the university ab initio.
Authentica habita is, in fact, a privilege granted not to a particular institution or even particular individuals, but to scholars as such. In particular, to scholars who have to travel from their homeland to a place of study: “we grant this favor of our piety to all scholars who travel for the sake of their studies, and especially to professors of divine and sacred laws, that both they and their messengers may come to the places where the studies of letters are pursued and dwell there in safety.” [“Omnibus qui causa studiorum peregrinantur scolaribus, et maxime divinarum atque sacrarum legum professoribus hoc nostre pietatis beneficium indulgemus, ut ad loca, in quibus literarum exercentur studia, tam ipsi quam eorum nuntii veniant et habitent in eis securi.”]
Anyone familiar with the contemporary practice of granting and revoking visas for students will immediately recognize the significance of Authentica habita. Not to put too fine a point on it: academic freedom is originally founded on this right for scholars to travel to and from their place of study. While legal scholars are singled out in the document, it secured a kind of cosmopolitan right of hospitality to all would-be-academics (including students).
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Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order nominally aimed at “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. Setting aside the absurdity of “restoring” something that never existed, what does that purport to mean?
Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:
(i) reproducible;
(ii) transparent;
(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;
(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;
(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;
(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;
(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;
(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and
(ix) without conflicts of interest.
It seems like someone in the Trump administration has been following the debate about how the “replication crisis” and reading op-eds in Nature about institutionally mandating the rules of sceince.
Somewhat counterintuitively, however, the “Open Science” reform community that had been publically excoriating science for not doing the things now (provisionally) mandated by the government things is outraged.
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Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction.
Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly and suddenly filled up with life. The first water skater appeared literally on day one. Now there are about a dozen of them. We’ve also picked up water beetles, a couple of aquatic snails, some little swimming shrimp-like things, and several of these guys:
Ichthyosaura alpestris, “fish-lizard of the Alps”, aka the Alpine Newt.
But how did they get there?
[click to continue…]
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How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and one could write many blogposts about what they could do better), isn’t there a basic sense in which they fulfill public functions in modern societies that should receive cross-partisan support? And shouldn’t there be some kind of recognition, on the part of lay people – which we all are, in the overwhelming majority of areas – that we need to trust the expertise of others for many public and private decisions?
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A few weeks ago the historian Perry Anderson published an essay “Regime Change in the West?” in the London Review of Books. Like many of Anderson’s essays this is a wide-ranging splurge full of bon mots and *apercus” delivered from some quasi-Olympian height. My attention was caught, though, by the following couple of sentences which both expressed a widely-held belief, even a cliché, but one which I knew to be false despite the lazy “of course” which Anderson interjects:
Historically too, of course, the US is an immigrant society, as no European country has ever been [emphasis added]. That means there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.
The reason I knew this to be false is that, unlike Anderson, I had taken the trouble in my own (non-historical) work on immigration to read the work of France’s foremost historian of the phenomenon, Gérard Noiriel in his now-classic work, Le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Seuil, 1988). In his opening chapter “The dismissal of memory”, Noiriel addresses both the facts and the myth, pointing out that while in the US immigration is understood as an “internal” part of the constitutive history of the nation, in France it has been treated as something episodic and external. But when you look at the facts, immigration has played as much of a role, and perhaps more, in French society as American.
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More than a month ago, I agreed to an offer to be a visiting scholar at a private US university next year. This was no simple matter because of obligations to my own family and (somewhat more unexpectedly) my department. I have made no public announcement on it yet not because I am especially personally worried by the Trump administration’s policies toward higher education, but rather because I am still completing (electronic) paperwork and background-checks from the host institution. (It would be bad luck to announce before the process is fully completed.)
Now, by academic standards, I have moved jobs (not always willingly) quite frequently and I have also accumulated quite a bit of visiting positions. I have worked in three different countries and have held all kinds of academic jobs during the last quarter century. So, I am familiar with the great variability in the process by which the (electronic) paperwork for an appointment can be completed. When it comes to paperwork before the appointment-process is completed nothing will ever beat my experience moving to Flanders back in 2009. But Stateside, I had a rule of thumb that wealthy private institutions are relatively unencumbered by paperwork relative to the state institutions in order to ‘enter’ the system. I have to abandon this maxim.
I have no prior experience with this particular private university and N=1, I shouldn’t make any claims on the basis of it. But since university administrators in the same ecology tend to mimic each other, I would not be surprised if what I am experiencing is part of a wider trend of bureaucratic enshittification [a phrase I am stealing from my friend Tom Stoneham] at US private universities. (I won’t bore you with a graph of the rise of the number of administrators in US universities, but I am not the first to remark on the phenomenon.)
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Over the last years, I have edited a volume of papers on the question how to make analytical political philosophy more inclusive, with a particular focus on the debates on economic and ecological inequalities. The starting point was the observation that analytical political philosophy has for a long time been criticised for marginalizing (to a greater or lesser extent) certain voices and perspectives. Some of these voices and perspectives are internal critics of the liberal tradition – think of the feminist critiques or the critiques by care ethicists. But there have also been external perspectives that have been largely ignored, in particular perspectives from outside the western traditions. While there are well-developed specialist literatures on all of these traditions, they tend to be studied mainly by specialists. Non-western political philosophy and the internal critiques of liberal political philosophy are still too often overlooked in the field. My own estimation is that things are getting better – but very slowly, and hence I wanted to edit a book to make another small contribution to these collective effects to make political philosophy more pluralistic. [click to continue…]
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I watched Attenborough’s latest blockbuster at the cinema last night with my family, and thought I’d collect some thoughts here. First off, it’s wonderfully put together. That’s hardly news with Attenborough. Of course, it’s beautifully shot, and captures marine animals doing things we haven’t seen them do before. Much of it is really entrancing.
It’s also quite a hard-hitting film. It focuses, laser-eyed, on the carnage industrial fishing is wreaking in the ocean. The middle section of the film, which follows the beam of a bottom trawler as it trashes – just demolishes! – everything on the seabed is genuinely traumatic to watch. There was an eerie silence in our cinema, which contained quite a few kids. Even though I knew intellectually what bottom trawling looked like, and the damage it does, I honestly don’t think I will ever forget those images. It is hard to imagine a more compelling visual demonstration of the harm we are doing to the planet.
I wouldn’t say I learned much from the film, but then I am a bit of an ocean conservation geek. I sincerely hope that as many people see the film as possible. I would love it to spark a kind of Rainbow Warrior moment, perhaps with regards to bottom trawling (scallop dredging, which the film also shows, is smaller in scale but hardly less destructive).
I was pleased to see explicit discussion of the colonial (fishing) practices that are still maiming the ocean, and impoverishing many coastal communities. There was also a genuine effort to learn from indigenous and non-Western perspectives, in addition to the usual North Atlantic voices.
My only reservations circle around the stories that the film does not tell.
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