Meanderings for 15 July 2022
We’ve had an amazing week of weather in Chicagoland — sunny, deep blue skies, no rain (until Friday), and some good spots on our daily walks. We saw a family of Wood Ducks on a log in the water, and one baby after another — eight of them — took turns hopping into the water to be with mom. Plus, if you are in southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois you may be spotting European Goldfinches. They’re spectacular!
https://ebird.org/species/eurgol
Speaking of birds, how do woodpeckers avoid concussions?
The brain of a woodpecker experiences a seemingly catastrophic impact every time beak meets wood.
"When you see these birds in action, hitting their head against a tree quite violently, then as humans we start wondering how does this bird avoid getting headaches or brain damage," says Sam Van Wassenbergh, a researcher at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.
In the past, scientists have suggested the bird's brain is protected from the impacts, perhaps by a skull that acts as a cushion, or a beak that absorbs some of the force, or a tongue that wraps around the brain.
But Van Wassenberg wasn't convinced.
"Nobody has ever explained it very well, in my opinion," he says.
So Van Wassenbergh led a team that set out to settle the issue using high speed video of woodpeckers in action.
"We went to four different zoos in Europe where they had woodpeckers and we recorded them at very high frame rates, while they were pecking," he says.
The videos, part of a study published in the journal Current Biology, revealed some remarkable details.
For example, "they close their eyes at the moment they impact the wood," Van Wassenbergh says, to protect their eyes from splinters.
The videos also showed that woodpeckers' beaks often get stuck in the wood. But they break free almost instantly, thanks to a clever beak design that provides independent motion of the upper and lower beak.
What the videos did not show is any sign that the woodpecker's brain is somehow cushioned.
"The way we see the head behaving is very rigid, like you would use a hammer hitting wood," Van Wassenbergh says.
That means the organ repeatedly experiences deceleration that would cause a concussion in a human brain. Yet the woodpecker brain emerges unscathed, even after thousands of impacts in a single day.
That is possible because a woodpecker's brain is protected — not by cushioning, but by its tiny size and weight, Van Wassenbergh says.
"An animal that has a smaller size can withstand higher decelerations," he says. "That's a biomechanical law."
I love Mary McLeod Bethune’s courage and I wrote about her in Blue Parakeet:
A 13-foot tall statue of educator and philanthropist Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune will be unveiled this week inside the U.S. Capitol Building after an arduous five-year process to get there.
The statue will be dedicated Wednesday at 11 a.m. in National Statuary Hall, making it the first of a Black person in the state collections. Other statues of prominent African Americans in other parts of the building honor Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks.
“This is one of the most important weeks in our state’s history and in the history of our country,” Nancy Lohman, president of the Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Statuary Fund, told The Florida Times-Union. “Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s statue unveiling and dedication is historic as the first African American — male or female — to be honored in the National Statuary Hall State Collection.”
“I am so proud,” she noted, “that the great State of Florida is becoming greater on July 13, 2022.”
The statue’s dedication will be broadcast by Florida news station WESH, and via a livestream feed at speaker.gov/live.
It will be one of two statues representing the state of Florida and replaces a bronze likeness of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith.
Bethune, the daughter of formerly enslaved people, rose to become a leader in women’s rights. She was also a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and served as an advisor to her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to her biography. In addition, she was the founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
“It’s a special moment for this university, a special moment for America,” said interim BCU President Lawrence M. Drake II, who also will be at the Capitol for the Wednesday ceremony.
A thin layer of watery ice covered the street between me and my parked car. The slick road wouldn’t have bothered me—except that I was nine months pregnant and carrying a laundry basket full of baby gifts as well as my book bag for teaching. I made it safely across, shuffling slowly in a pair of sandals, the only shoes that still fit. I was exhausted by the time I got everything, including my swollen body, into the parked car.
Four days later, with the wintery weather still lingering, I gave birth to my second child. It didn’t go smoothly. She ended up in the NICU while I had to recover from a C-section. Because I was still teaching two courses that semester, as delineated by my assistant professor contract, I had work to do; it didn’t matter that I was barely post-partum. I remember sitting on my hospital bed trying to finish an online lecture, responding to student questions about an honors thesis, and pumping milk to feed my newborn, all while trying to ignore the burning pain from the staples holding my insides together. It was one of the few times in my life that I questioned my vocation.
I was lucky, though.
In 2010, the year I had my daughter, only two states—California and New Jersey—had paid family leave. I worked for a university in the state of Texas that had not yet implemented a maternity policy, which meant no clear guidelines existed to navigate having a baby without taking a semester of unpaid leave. Yet, I managed to take a few weeks off without missing a paycheck. The flexibility of my department chair and the generosity of my colleagues enabled me to cobble together four weeks of maternity leave. Spring break gave me a fifth week. It wasn’t a fun semester, but I was grateful to keep my job.
I was also grateful for my private office and the means to purchase a breast pump, as neither lactation rooms nor a lactation policy existed at my workplace in 2010. I had good insurance that covered 80 percent of the hospital bills for my surgery, hospital stay, my daughter’s birth, and the five days she spent in the NICU. I had a supportive husband with a moderately flexible work schedule. I had family willing and able to take care of an infant, saving us the high cost of childcare. Although 31,000 pregnancy discrimination suits were filed in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015, my biggest workplace issue at the time was a negative student comment in my course evaluations.
I was so lucky—a white, educated woman with a good job, access to quality medical care, enough medical insurance, and sufficient support networks to alleviate the physical, financial, and professional cost of birthing a baby. When the Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed Roe v. Wade, filling my twitter feed with celebratory comments from white women just like me, it reminded me of how lucky my pregnancy experiences had been.
Jodi Magness is one of our finest archaeologists:
(RNS) — The earliest known depiction of biblical heroines Jael and Deborah was discovered at an ancient synagogue in Israel, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced last week. A rendering of one figure driving a stake through the head of a military general was the initial clue that led the team to identify the figures, according to project director Jodi Magness.
“This is extremely rare,” Magness, an archaeologist and religion professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, told Religion News Service. “I don’t know of any other ancient depictions of these heroines.”
The nearly 1,600-year-old mosaics were uncovered by a team of students and specialists as part of The Huqoq Excavation Project, which resumed its 10th season of excavations this summer at a synagogue in the ancient Jewish village of Huqoq in Lower Galilee. Mosaics were first discovered at the site in 2012, and Magness said the synagogue, which dates to the late fourth or early fifth century, is “unusually large and richly decorated.” In addition to its extensive, relatively well-preserved mosaics, the site is adorned with wall paintings and carved architecture.
The fourth chapter of the Book of Judges tells the story of Deborah, a judge and prophet who conquered the Canaanite army alongside Israelite general Barak. After the victory, the passage says, the Canaanite commander Sisera fled to the tent of Jael, where she drove a tent peg into his temple and killed him.
The newly discovered mosaic panels depicting the heroines are made of local cut stone from Galilee and were found on the floor on the south end of the synagogue’s west aisle. The mosaic is divided into three sections, one with Deborah seated under a palm tree looking at Barak, a second with what appears to be Sisera seated and a third with Jael hammering a peg into a bleeding Sisera.
Magness said it’s impossible to know why this rare image was included but noted that additional mosaics depicting events from the Book of Judges, including renderings of Sampson [sic], are on the south end of the synagogue’s east aisle. According to the UNC-Chapel Hill press release, the events surrounding Jael and Deborah might have taken place in the same geographical region as Huqoq, providing at least one possible reason for the mosaic.
Airport nightmare: lost bags. Thousands. Delta gets it done!
New York (CNN Business)Delta Air Lines took what it called a "creative" step to solve a massive baggage problem for passengers flying through troubled Heathrow Airport. Others might call the move extreme: the airline flew a plane from London to its hub in Detroit packed with 1,000 lost bags and zero passengers.
A staffing shortage that has caused a service meltdown at Heathrow in recent weeks has now been dubbed "airmageddon." Airport authorities have responded to the canceled flights and massive lost baggage complaints by telling airlines they must cap the number of passengers at one of the world's busiest airports to 100,000 a day.
So Delta figured out a way to get the lost bags out of the airport, even though it couldn't take more passengers.
Mike Bird, speaking at a webinar on the new masculinity:
A while back I wrote a post on The Case for Post-Patriarchal Manhood, a post that I stand by in terms of diagnosing the current crisis around masculinity and proposing a tentative solution for how to address it.
On the back of that, I’m glad to announce that I’ll be speaking at a virtual seminar run by Christians for Biblical Equality along with several distinguished speakers on Forging a New Masculinity, with a specific focus on “Nice Guys”, “Toxic Masculinity”, Biblical Manhood”? Can we get beyond the stereotypes & forge a better way?
Save the date: 22 July, 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Melbourne time.