Saved comments during August 2021

[neonvincent]

My comment(s) on The Future is a Landscape

Excellent post, as usual, but I have a quibble with part of "during the last ice age, for example, Death Valley was a sparkling blue lake surrounded by pine forests..." Maybe single-leaf pinyon, which still lives below limber pine and bristlecone pine on the flanks of Telescope Peak in Death Valley National Park today, but when I looked at a 1999 United States Geological Survey publication on Death Valley (Page 130), it didn't mention any pine fossils found in packrat middens from the late Pleistocene. Instead, the author cited papers that listed Joshua tree, chaparral yucca, which lives where I grew up in coastal southern California, and two species of juniper, one of which grows along with single-leaf pinyon today. That doesn't contradict your point that Death Valley was much different 18,000 years ago than today. One of the papers cited in the 1999 USGS paper interpreted the fossil plant assemblage as supporting "a Pleistocene climate which was less arid and more equable than today. Precipitation is estimated to have been three to four times the present values and summers 8–14°C cooler." I just doubt it would have looked much like the photo of Maligne Lake in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada with lodgepole pines growing on Spirit Island and along the lakeshore that you used to illustrate that paragraph.

My comment on IF THE COVID DOOMSAYERS ARE RIGHT, EXPECT A LOT MORE INFECTIONS -- AND MAYBE A GOP WAVE ELECTION.

Take it from this zoologist, the answer is no. Africanized bees might put up a more aggressive defense of their colony than non-Africanized bees, but it won't be enough as their stings won't be any better at penetrating the Asian Giant Hornet's exoskeleton than any other honeybee. Japanese honeybees know better; they cook the hornets instead.

My comment on Magic Monday for August 23, 2021.

Last Monday, I listened to the local Detroit NPR station interview Nina Gryphon, who reviewed your book about geomancy favorably when it came out, about the mondane astrology of the United States. She mentioned three things that I hadn't heard of before: the Ebenezer Sibley chart for the U.S., that the U.S. is experiencing a Pluto return, and Andre Barbault's prediction of the pandemic based on Saturn square Uranus followed by “a splendid relaunch of civilization” during the second half of this decade. I'm trying to recall if you have written about the Sibley chart, so what do you think of it? Also, the idea of a Pluto return being important is intriguing, but how signficant would it really be if Pluto is returning to a position it held when it was unknown during a time when its influence is fading? Also, what about that aspect between Saturn and Uranus and Barbault's interpretation of it? The audio of the interview and the station's write up of it is available at the link.
https://wdet.org/posts/2021/08/19/91320-what-astrology-says-about-the-future-of-the-united-states/

My comment on Miocene (Pt 28): Miniature Super-horses and the Dawn of the Guinea Pigs.

The interpretation I have seen over the decades for Macraucheniids like Theosodon having their bony nostrils located so far back and up on their rostrums is that the animals had trunks like tapirs or saiga antelopes. That would also have made the animal look unusual, although not as strange as a phytosaur with nostrils between its eyes compared to a modern crocodilian, which your text implies.

My comment on All the World's Deer: White-tailed and Mule Deer.

I enjoyed reading about both species of deer I'm most familiar with. Growing up in California, I could visit Mule Deer in the mountains. I don't recall them visiting the neighborhood of my youth on the fringes of Los Angeles, even though they lived in the Santa Monica Mountains a few miles away.

On the other hand, White-tailed Deer visit where I live now in the Detroit suburbs all the time. Before the pandemic, I would see them once or twice a month. After the pandemic began, they became a near-daily sight as traffic declined, people stayed inside, and the area became quieter and safer for them. Even as human activity returned, they have stuck around and I can see them in both front and back yards from inside my house.

That's the good news about the pandemic and deer. The bad news is that Nature reported at the beginning of this month that coronavirus is rife in White-tailed Deer based on a preprint of a paper from Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory. The most likely mechanism is that they picked it up from surface water contaminated by sewage. I don't know of any direct human-to-deer or deer-to-human transmission. I hope it stays that way.

My comment on Jackals on the Motorway.

When I look at the photo of the animal and then read the description of the recent spread of Golden Jackals, I'm reminded of the recent and ongoing range expansion of coyotes here in North America. That happened because humans have made the eastern part of the continent more hospitable for them by clearing forests and eliminating competitors and predators. Climate change may even play a part in the coyote expanding to the north. I can't help but wonder if those factors are contributing to Golden Jackals expanding their range to the north and, in this case, west as well.