A taxonomy of imaginary elephants

When people who've never seen an elephant try to draw one, the results can be ... interesting.

German artist Uli Westphal has created a family tree of imaginary elephants, based on old accounts and travellers' tales, as drafted by medieval European artists, then elaborated by subsequent copyists.

The resulting bestiary ranges from the conservative (tapier-like creatures, drawn by artists who presumably wanted to keep the reported trunk down to a plausible-looking size), to fanciful beasts sporting fanned-out ears, ribbed like fish fins, or bat wings.

Interestingly, it's some of the most conservative visions, with a modest trunk, or bodily proportions based on a known animal like a horse, that look the least like a real elephant.

The universe, as someone* once mused, is not only odder than we imagine, but probably odder than we can imagine. Although a few of these illustrators got pretty close to out-odding nature with elephants that wouldn't have been out of place in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Via

*Someone who could also have explained exactly why an animal the size of an elephant doesn't have the same proportions as a horse.

Atypical British bank holiday weather

The River Great Ouse at Newport Pagnell. The weather's been scorching, we had a dip in the cool, inviting water and saw a grass snake swim across the river, coming out of those reeds and slithering into the undergrowth on the opposite bank.

A timely reminder that there's more to life than whingeing about the state of the world.

Hims ancient and modern

After carelessly mowing down and killing a mother of two by speeding along a busy street on a non-road-legal track bike with no front brakes, 20 year old Charlie Alliston has been convicted of causing bodily harm by “wanton and furious driving.” The wording of the offence sounds ancient, almost quaint, but the words "wanton" and "furious" are surprisingly appropriate here. If Alliston had shown some hint of empathy, remorse, or responsibility for his actions, this could have been *just* another tragic accident. But, instead, what we got was a wanton outburst of entitled fury aimed squarely at his victim:

Following the crash, Alliston posted a comment on an online news article claiming he had shouted out "to get out of the way" but she "ignored me", looked back at her phone then "stopped dead" in his path.

He wrote: "I feel bad due to the seriousness of her injuries but I can put my hands up and say this is not my fault."

On an internet forum for fixed bike enthusiasts, he later described how he twice warned her to "get the f*** outta my way".

He wrote: "We collided pretty hard, our heads hit together, hers went into the floor and ricocheted into mine. It is a pretty serious incident so I won't bother saying oh she deserved it, it's her fault. Yes it is her fault but no she did not deserve it.

"Hopefully, it is a lesson learned on her behalf, it shouldn't have happened like it did but what more can I say."

He complained: "Everyone is quick to judge and help the so-called victim but not the other person in the situation, ie me. It all happened so fast and even at a slow speed there was nothing I could do. I just wish people would stop making judgments. It's not my fault people either think they are invincible or have zero respect for cyclists." 

My emphasis.

What could be more zeitgeisty than an entitled, self-pitying man-baby wantonly and furiously running down any female who dares to impede his royal progress? I'm irresistibly reminded of some of the things Tim Squirrell found scuttling around when he looked under the rock of an alt-right Reddit community for his recent "Taxonomy of trolls", especially in the specific sub- communities of mens' rights activists and anti-progressive gamers. He describes the latter as:

Closely related to the above [i.e. men’s rights activists], these trolls were radicalized over the course of the #GamerGate hate movement. They really like video games, and they really hate social-justice warriors, gay people, and feminists, all of whom they’re pretty sure major movie and game studios are “pandering” to with things like all-female screenings of Wonder Woman. You’re likely to see them talking about the trans community a lot (and repeating the words “there are only two genders” constantly). Elsewhere on Reddit, you’ll find them in gaming subreddits, or /r/KotakuinAction, which was the home of GamerGate.

• Most common words: SJW, snowflake, pandering, tumblr, feminist, triggering, GamerGate, virtue signalling 

 "Wanton and furious driving" may sound like a relic from a bygone age, but furious, self-obsessed male misfits yelling at everybody else to "get the f*** out of my way!" are, sadly, as much a product of the modern world as the latest video game release.

"Look at my economist over here"

Remember this, from last year?

Donald Trump sought to tout his support among African-Americans on Friday by pointing out a black man in the crowd and calling him "my African-American.""Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?"

These were, of course, the words of a known con-artist bigging up an almost non-existent group of supporters (in the subsequent elections just 8% "his" voters were black - 88% of African-Americans who voted came out for his opponent).

Times haven't changed much, as the British media, and in particular the BBC, proved when they looked at  an unimpressive array of practically bugger-all economists with a good word to say about Brexit, then pointed and shouted "Look over there" when a single rogue economist popped up with a shaky claim about a hard Brexit promising a "£135bn annual boost" to the UK economy.

Well, that headline lie has been round the world before the truth had got its boots on. The misleading headlines have been duly generated and the damage done but, for all that, it's still worth quoting Ben Chu in the Independent, at length, to get a sense of just how massively misleading this distraction was and how shamefully complicit the BBC has been in spreading the lie:

Imagine if a group of obscure scientists produced a piece of research which claimed to debunk the consensus of the profession.

Imagine if rather than making that research publicly available the group cobbled together a press release with some eye-catching headline figures, showing none of their methodology or data.

Imagine if that group of scientists had produced similar work in the past which had been shown to be deeply flawed by other scientists on multiple levels.

Now imagine if that press release was picked up by the national broadcaster of the country and presented to the public as an exciting and interesting new piece of research – with none of the above context mentioned.

Would you think that the broadcaster was doing a good job, fulfilling its mission to “educate and inform” the public?

Or would you wonder what they hell it was playing at?

This week, the BBC website “splashed” with the news that a group known as Economists for Free Trade had done some work suggesting that the UK economy could be £135bn larger if we forced through a hard Brexit. The next day the report’s author Patrick Minford was invited on to the BBC’s flagship morning radio programme, Today, to talk about his findings.

The programme did invite another economist on to contradict Minford’s views. But the non-specialist listener would have been left with the false impression that the economics profession was split on the issue, that the impact of Brexit is merely a matter of opinion. Leaving the EU’s single market might be good for trade, or it might be bad: the experts just can’t agree.

In fact, most experts are agreed - Minford is an outlier and an unreliable-sounding one at that:

He may not have released his methodology, but we can reliably guess how Minford generated his latest figures because he has in the past used a grossly unreliable economic model to show startlingly large gains from what has been termed “unilateral free trade” for the UK.

The principal and catastrophic flaw in this model is that it assumes that distance is no barrier to the international trade in goods – when all the empirical evidence of decades is that distance matters enormously, as countries do more trade with those who are geographically closer to them. Another fatal error is the assumption that price, rather than quality, is all that matters to consumers.

Numerous other reasons by other, more competent, trade economists have been identified as reasons to disbelieve Minford’s figures, not least the fact that his definition of hard Brexit, bizarrely, seems to assume closer regulatory harmonisation between Britain and the EU than exists at the moment within the single market. 

Isn't he the greatest?

In which I apologise for misrepresenting Donald J Trump

Yesterday I made a snide remark about "the special favours Trump's been doing for his rich buddies on Wall Street." On reflection, I think I was being inaccurate and unfair.

Sure, Trump's inner circle are all high net worth individuals (why would you hang out with a guy like that, if you respected anything other than money?), but they're not from Wall Street. As Bess Levin wrote in Vanity Fair a while back "Trump’s habit of reneging on contracts and suing his lenders meant that virtually nobody on Wall Street wanted to work with him."

Yep, it turns out out that bankers adore not being cheated out of their money even more than they love the mega-rich. So there was presumably no real love lost between The Donald and Squiddy McSquidface, even before that eclipse gag.

As Bess Levin's article notes, there is an exception that proves the rule, namely  Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump $4 billion over the last 20 years and kept his line of credit open despite being sued by Trump in 2008:

...when he fell behind on payments on the $640 million loan he was given to build Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Incredibly, in order to avoid paying the $40 million he had personally guaranteed, Trump and his lawyer argued that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”—i.e. the global financial crisis—and therefore it should pay him $3 billion in damages under the extraordinary event clause in his contract. Naturally, the bank countersued, calling the real-estate developer’s claim “classic Trump.” In the end, after threatening to take his name off the building if he wasn’t granted more time to pay, the bank gave Trump extra time; when he did pay the money he owed to the firm’s real-estate lending division, it was with another loan he got from Deutsche’s wealth-management unit. Trump subsequently moved his business from the real estate group to the private wealth management group, where, according to the Times, “executives were more willing to deal with him.”

Trump's $3 billion damages claim was ridiculous, but the argument that “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing”, is also just about the least misleading statement that Trump has ever made.

There's a possible Russia connection in Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank, but even if there isn't, there's a very interesting story buried in all those loans, about how much, or little, Trump is really worth, once you subtract the money he owes to the creditors he's not managed to diddle. Enough to bring the whole house of cards down, once counsel Mueller's investigation exposes the workings of the Trump shell game? No wonder Wall Street's wary of him - those guys really hate rip-off merchants and it takes one to know one.

Could @realDonaldTrump be closer to the wannabe lynchers in Charlottesville than the looters on Wall Street, not just in his bigotry, but in his real net worth?

When you've lost the great vampire squid...

Wish the moon wasn't the only thing casting a shadow across the country. We got through one, we'll get through the other. #SolarEclipse2017

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) 21 August 2017

Squiddy's snarky comment looks a bit ungrateful, considering all the special favours Trump's been doing for his rich buddies on Wall Street. Or was he, as another tweeter speculated, on both sides of his trade with The Donald (they call it "hedging")? Is there money to be made from shorting white supremacism?

Whether this tweet was two-faced, or merely ungracious, wasn't entirely self-evident. Slightly more obvious was the short list of candidates to for the other "thing" casting a shadow over America. It had to be either The Donald or this adorable critter...

*

*I'm not quite sure where the image originally came from. Fair use? Yeah, probably...

Dave's modest proposal

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me:

Fitness enthusiast Dave May has urged his local gym to allow him to continue to enjoy the benefits of belonging to his gym after cancelling his gym membership.

In an e-mail sent at 3am on Monday morning, Dave expressed his desire for "the freest and most frictionless use" of both equipment and personal trainers after his membership expires.

To achieve this, Dave wants his gym to allow services and facilities he has been using before exit day to be used by him without "any additional requirements or restrictions" after he leaves and for him to remain authorised to access the gym after ceasing to be a member.

These proposals would reassure Dave and allow him to "plan ahead with certainty" as he prepares to exit his 12-month contract, the e-mail says.

In a Facebook post accompanying the e-mail, Dave said: "This e-mail will help give me certainty and confidence in my status as a fitness powerhouse after I have left my gym.

"It also shows that as I enter negotiations with my fitness provider, it is clear that my separation from my gym and my future relationship with it are inextricably linked.

"I have already begun to set out what I would like to see from a future relationship on issues such as the use of cardiovascular and resistance machines and am ready to begin a formal dialogue on this and other issues."

And he can't say fairer than that...