Month: November 2014

“Bats live in a world of acoustic warfare,” writes Ed Yong. He describes a study that investigated a type of bat call with an “antagonistic bent”:

It’s called the sinFM. The bats rapidly raise and lower the pitch of their call more than a dozen times over, in bursts or “syllables” that last just a tenth of a second. The bats only ever did this [under observation] when one of their peers was using its feeding buzz, and was about to snag an insect. And when these hunting bats heard the sinFM, they usually flubbed their strikes, missing their targets between 77 and 85 percent of the time.

Yong goes on to describe an experiment that tested whether “the bats use their sinFM calls to actively jam the sonar of their competitors”:

[The researchers] attached a thin line to a street light, and dangled a moth from it. Whenever a bat approached this bait, they played a recording of a sinFM call from a nearby speaker. Normally, bats capture the dangling moths around 70 percent of the time, and neither a loud tone nor burst of noise put them off. But a sinFM call slashed their success rate to below 20 percent. Even though the moths were hanging in place, the bats couldn’t hit them.

And critically, the sinFM only worked if it overlapped with the bats’ feeding buzz. If the team played it just before an attack, it had no effect. Clearly, this call isn’t an off-putting shout. It really does seem to be a way for bats to jam each other. It isn’t meant to overwhelm a target’s senses like, say, a bright light shone into another person’s eyes. It’s more subtle than that. I imagine it to be more like saddling an opponent with a set of goggles that makes their world fuzzier.

If [researchers Aaron] Corcoran and [William] Conner are right, they’ve discovered the first example of a non-human animal that competes with a rival by disrupting its senses.

Nathan Heller savages Steven Pinker’s writing guide The Sense of Style, arguing that its arguments against prescriptivism “justify bad habits that certain people would rather not be bothered to unlearn”:

Some skimmings from the final part of Pinker’s book ran in the Guardian last month, under the provocative headline “10 ‘Grammar Rules’ It’s OK To Break (Sometimes).” It is a brazen document. Armed with examples from pop culture and from the literary canon, Pinker tries to shoot down some basic principles of English grammar (such as the distinction between “who” and “whom”), some looser stylistic preferences (such as the recommendation against splitting infinitives), and some wholly permissible things widely rumored to be wrong (such as beginning sentences with “but” or “and”). …

Too often, Pinker makes choices about usage on aesthetic grounds. He says that his new rules are graceful, but the standards of grace seem to be mainly his own. It’s for grammatical consistency, not beauty or gentilesse, for example, that correct English has us say “It was he” instead of “It was him.” Pinker calls this offense “a schoolteacher rule” that is “a product of the usual three confusions: English with Latin, informal style with incorrect grammar, and syntax with semantics.” He’s done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he’s talking about here. As he knows, the nominative and accusative cases are the reason that we don’t say gibberish like “Her gave it to he and then sat by we here!” No idea is more basic to English syntax and grammar. In the phrase “It was he,” “it” and “he” are the same thing: they’re both the subject, and thus nominative. This is not “Latin.” (Our modern cases had their roots in tribal Germanic.)

Robert Lane Greene objects to that line of criticism:

Logic and consistency are, of course, good things. But both words mean different things to different people, and sometimes the goals conflict. For Mr Heller, it is “logical” that “was” should be like a grammatical equals sign. So if the subject of the sentence It was he is nominative, so should the pronoun in the predicate be: it = he. But case systems don’t care about invisible equals signs. In French, this construction is forbidden: the French say c’est moi, not c’est je, using a special set of pronouns (usually called “emphatic”) rather than the nominative ones. Nobody accuses the language of Pascal and Descartes of being any less logical than English.

In Danish, it is det er mig (“it is me”), using the accusative pronoun, not det er jeg (”it is I”). And yet no one says the language of Kierkegaard is a confusing mess. And it just so happens that the ancestors of the Danes and the French conquered England, contributing to the language’s mixed nature. It is me didn’t show up in writing until the 15th century, and so may not come directly from those languages. But contact between speakers of different languages did give English a habit of accepting different ways of saying things, such as both the king’s son (typically Germanic) and the son of the king (typically French). In any case, variety is not the same thing as the “complexity, ambiguity and doubt” Mr Heller fears.

Previous Dish on The Sense of Style here and here.

Given that Obama has little to lose at this point in his presidency, Eric Posner dreams. On what legal authority?

[Obama] could cite his commander-in-chief power under the Constitution and argue that Congress cannot force him to detain enemy combatants he believes should be released. It was on that basis that he recently traded five Guantanamo detainees for Bowe Bergdahl, an American solider captured by the Taliban. There are also various statutory loopholes he could exploit. Indeed, the president could declare the war with al-Qaida over, and in this way remove the legal foundation for the remaining Guantanamo detentions. It is perhaps for this reason that the president has announced that he wants a statute from Congress that authorizes the use of force against ISIS.

Once that statute is in place, he could formally declare the war with al-Qaida, and would be able to drop the fiction that ISIS and al-Qaida are the same entity, which he used to justify relying on the statute that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida for hostilities with ISIS.

One major constraint on all these actions is that Obama can sustain them only as long as he remains in office. Since he can’t make law, the next president will not be bound to continue them. However, the practical significance of this constraint is nil. If Obama releases Guantanamo detainees, the next president will not be able to put them back in Guantanamo. He or she could reopen Guantanamo and repopulate it with a new batch of terrorists, but the Guantanamo experiment was a failure, and no future president will repeat it.

I’d argue that this is a legitimate use of the president’s wartime executive authority. Would Obama ever do it? Maybe as a final, irreversible act two years from now – like his power to pardon. But it does not seem to me to be likely given the president’s institutional conservatism and aversion to “any sudden moves.” But then, I have no idea what Obama is really like when his long game is done and he really does not have anything left to lose. It sure would be a high note to go out on – the mother of all meep meeps.