Purchase of the day.

From the February 25, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Marineland Penguin 200B/350B/170B/330B Rite-Size C Filter Cartridge 6 pk "(Earnings to the Althouse blog = $2.55)

... and 98 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Thanks to all who support this blog by not letting it tank.

Oh, and...

"In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were..."

"... and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish. I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies."

Said Rand Paul, and Princeton professor Iain Couzin protests.

It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. And: "Our work aims to understand the principles of collective control in animal groups and what this can inform us about collective robotics. It has nothing at all to do with human politics."

"If you think about it, schools of fish have been on the planet for much longer than we have and they’ve evolved to find solutions to problems. They can sense the environments in ways that we simply didn’t know how to do that.... From ant colonies to schooling fish, it’s not that complicated but the feats they can achieve are extraordinary. The collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot."

I'm glad he mentioned the ants, because if there is one tag that I love to get the opportunity to use on a blog post, it's "insect politics." The tag is based on the 1986 movie "The Fly," in which a scientific experiment — which I doubt Rand Paul would vote to fund — merged a scientist with a fly. Toward the bitter end, the fly/scientist — played by Jeff Goldblum — started raving about insect politics:

Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh...

But now, apparently, the human politicians are funding not just insect politics but fish politics (and robots!). I'd love to see a movie called "The Fish," in which Jeff Goldblum does a science experiment that turns him into a crazy, raving Goldblum/Goldfish* and rants about fish politics.

Or... oh, wait!... was that already a movie with Don Knotts? "The Incredible Mr. Limpet"! Knotts is a little man who tries to enlist in the Navy in 1941. Rejected, he wanders down a pier, falls into the water, and turns into a fish. As a fish, he's able to join the Navy, and he helps locate and torpedo Nazi submarines. How do you like that, you doubter of science, Senator Paul?

Ah, but Mr. Limpet was a heroic individual superfish, and Professor Couzin is interested in fish because of the way they act in the collective. Typical left-wing elite university ideology. The value of studying fish is that they've evolved past individualism. They give us a way to look at how the collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot. But this has nothing at all to do with human politics. This is about collective robotics. Nothing to worry about here. The collective. Robots. Nothing to do with humans.
___________________________

*Yes, I know. It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. That makes me think of a movie too.

Fishy...

... Fish.

At the Ice Cold Café...

... we see the Wisconsin Capitol building reflected on the glassy clear and oh-so-thick ice of Lake Mendota, where hearty men fish and full-blooded dogs romp, while timid souls linger on the shoreline and fret about safety. It's America, baby! It's Wisconsin! There is room for the bold individualists and the hand-wringing collectivists. All contribute to the molten mush of human thought here in this moment we were made for. God bless Madison, Wisconsin, and God bless the United States of America.

ADDED: The full-blooded God dog:



The hearty men:




Closer:

One tuna fish, sold for $1,763,000.

It weighed 489 pounds, which is $3,603 a pound. Sliver it into nearly weightless sashimi, and presumably customers won't choke on the price.

How I spent the winter break between semesters at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

I sat in my Freedom Chair or stood at my motorized desk in front of a wall of picture windows looking out over our snow-covered yard though which a dog occasionally bounded, and — once the blizzard came — went cross-country skiing nearly every day. I ate many delicious meals at home with my beloved husband, and watched some football games on TV. I blogged, read, graded some exams, worked on new syllabi, reorganized a couple closets, and — at long last — burned the rest of the CDs I still cared about into my iTunes.

But my colleague Nina, after going to Poland and back, went to Turkey, and here she is in Alacati attending a fish auction.

We cannot understand what they're saying or how they're bidding, but the very idea of a fish auction is, to me, unusual and therefore cool to watch. The people are keenly tuned to what's on the table.

She can't understand the Alacati fish auction, and I can't understand going to Turkey, let alone Alacati, let alone the fish auction in Alacati.

But that's the thing about the world. There are all kinds of people in it.

"It's broadly accepted by those who have known them, an outdoor dog indoors lives a rich imaginative life."

"Some do. Special dogs do. Handlers and owners respond to these special animals automatically without even realizing sometimes exactly the nobility they're close to. They give them names of authority, kings, philosophers, warriors and such, people of note, even gods. The dogs do quietly exercise their unique magical talents when time allows and calm prevails and there are no noisy people around pestering their singular canid repose."

Says Chip Ahoy, appropriating yesterday's photograph of our borrowed god-dog Zeus:



(Here's the "God Dog" music to play in the background.)

"It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

"No one knows what it's like to be the bad fish, to be the sad fish, behind blue eye."

"Jokes about an eyeball washing up from the sea? Now that's what I call... *sunglasses* ...aqueous humor."

Let's see... what tags do I put on this post? So wrong and yet so right: fisheye.

"There is now a live stream of bears gathering to eat salmon at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park."

Lovely! It's not dark yet in Alaska, so you can see the bears right now.

What is Obama pointing at?

The Drudge headline says "Unrelenting," and the link goes to "Unrelenting Obama jabs at Romney's job record."

But look closely. X marks the spot. There's pointing, and there's an X:



Right under the links about the 29-year-old Obama campaign worker who collapsed and died, there's a photo with a prominent X, the shadow cast by a cross. "UPDATE: Cross-Bearing TX Teen Arrives in DC After Month-Long Journey..."

“I felt God put this in my heart, and it’s something I felt so strong about, to just pick up my cross and carry it....”

Said one Junior Garcia of Oasis Church in Saginaw. I think of Saginaw, Michigan. But this is Saginaw, Texas. Did you know Paul Simon wrote his song "America" — which mentions Saginaw — in Saginaw, Michigan?

Bob Dyer, a former Saginaw disc jockey and organizer of Y-A-Go-Go, a concert series hosted by the Saginaw YMCA, 1915 Fordney, booked Simon and Garfunkel to play three months before “Sounds of Silence” became a No. 1 national hit in 1966, according to Saginaw News records.

“I asked Paul Simon if they were still charging the $1,250 we paid them to play and he said they were getting about four times that much then,” Dyer told The Saginaw News in 2004. “Then I asked him why he hadn't pulled out, and he said he had to see what a city named Saginaw looked like."

At the link there are photos of spray-painted Simon lyrics on decrepit buildings:

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America...

It took Junior Garcia a month and a half to drag his 12-foot-long cross along the back roads of America from Saginaw to Washington.

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why..."

Junior is probably aching but not empty, but how about the rest of America? Why is Obama pointing? We get the evocation of Uncle Sam...



But what does Obama want from us? Nothing. We will be receiving. Somebody else — those rich people somewhere else — will be giving. He's "unrelenting" tormenting Mitt Romney, poking and prodding him about Bain. He's trying to be the bane of Mitt Romney's existence. He's toying with him, teasing him...



Photo animation by Chip Ahoy, who can show you how to make a salad with a fish.



But what is Drudge trying to say? He's just toying with us, teasing us...

"My fish died when I wasn't home. Asked my cousin to give him a proper flushing.."

"She sent me this."

Wisconsin protests of the all-you-can-eat-fish-fry kind.

"We asked for more fish, and they refused to give us more fish."

Why are we so hostile to non-natives?

"Giant cannibal shrimp more than a FOOT long invade waters off Gulf Coast."

The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to eight inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp.

Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp. Both, however, can be eaten by humans.

‘They’re supposed to be very good,’ Pam Fuller, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. ‘But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters.’

They're very good. They're the size of lobsters. Does everything have to be a problem? Can't we just say thanks?

This reminds me of #Asian Carp on an American Rampage# — the Chinese puzzlement at our anguish over Asian carp, their favorite food fish.

"It’s totally maddening... They’re just doing it to make all the green people happy."

Whole Foods will no longer sell "red rated fish."

"The other day I gave her mash and fishfingers for dinner — something quite boring — and her response was 'That’s impressive,' so she has a sense of humor, too."

An English dad describes the experience of living with a 4-year-old genius. 

ADDED: Confession: I had to Google to make sure "mash" referred to potatoes. The process of doing blog tags confronted me with the part of my brain — of whatever size IQ, I don't know — that has been dealing with English food. Long ago, "mash" got mushed with "mushy peas," and I'd never had the push to straighten that out until just now. But, thanks to Wikipedia, I've set my head straight. "Mash" is just mashed potatoes. And "bangers and mash" — which sounds dirty — is just sausages and mashed potatoes, which I think are "impressive."

The term "bangers" is attributed to the fact that sausages, particularly the kind made during World War II under rationing, were made with water so they were more likely to explode under high heat if not cooked carefully; modern sausages do not have this attribute.

Wikipedia kindly includes some pop culture references, including Peter Sellers singing to Sophia Loren, about how he's unsatisfied with her "macaroni" and would like her to "give us a bash at the bangers and mash me mother used to make," which you can listen to on one of those YouTube videos where all you look at is the record spinning. Sellers and Loren do their best to exclude any double entendre that those lyrics may seem to convey in writing.

There's also a Radiohead number called "Bangers + Mash," which has lyrics that begin "You bit me, bit me, bit me, ow," which is something Peter Sellers never sang to Sophia Loren.

Times change, which reminds me of my favorite "banger" song: "Lieutenant Custard & His Banger of Time," which involves a time-travel sausage. Please be careful with this!

At the Tuna Fish Café...

... experience dollops of joy.

Everything Mark Twain wanted to eat...

... when he arrived home in the United States of America after traveling around in France and Italy in 1870:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie hens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry.

Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Funny about the frogs! I thought that's what they ate in France that we think is yucky.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

ADDED: I've redone the text so it looks the way it appears in my Kindle version of 300 works of Mark Twain. It's not written in list/poem form. It still, however, says "Prairie liens, from Illinois," which Nichevo, in the comments, surmises is a misscanned Prairie hens, from Illinois. Ah, yes, here's an article about "The 'Prairie Hens' of Illinois" with the subtitle "Mark Twain’s favorite birds ... to eat." I'm going to correct the text above.

"Isn’t this the last guy who should be pointing fingers and accusing others of taking pills for recreational purposes?"

Maureen Dowd takes a shot at Rush Limbaugh, kind of missing the point, because no one doubts that Rush paid for his own recreational pills. But I say "kind of," because Rush's attack on Sandra Fluke floundered because he lost focus on the real issue: that she wanted reimbursement for her birth control expenses. He veered into simply attacking the woman for —  he assumed — having a whole lot of sex — 3 times a day!

"Study of Fish Suggests the Value of Uninformed Voters."

Scientists trained some golden shiners to associate a blue target with food and a smaller group of shiners to associate food with a yellow target, yellow being the color shiners "more naturally prefer."

When all these trained fish were put together, "most fish pursued yellow targets, suggesting the smaller group’s more intense desire for yellow overwhelmed the larger group’s numerical advantage... But as fish without any training were added, the group increasingly favored the blue target..." said Iain D. Couzin, a Princeton professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

The research team theorized that "A strongly opinionated minority can dictate group choice... But the presence of uninformed individuals spontaneously inhibits this process, returning control to the numerical majority."

The behavior of golden shiners demonstrates “the role of uninformed individuals in achieving democratic consensus amid internal group conflict and informational constraints...”

And thus: “ignorance can promote democracy.” Or so these biology experts observe. Obviously, fish aren't people, and the color target training isn't much the same as learning about the world and then forming judgments on political issues and candidates.

Human civilization, said Larry J. Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, “is better off when more of its members are well informed and think carefully about the choices facing the society.”

Sure, we're better off educated and thinking consciously and carefully, but most of our political judgments are made reflexively in response to largely unexamined emotional responses, and it's possible that the uninformed masses are doing something valuable in correcting for the intense opinions of radical individuals.

Anyway... the Iowa caucuses take place today. Caucuses — more than primaries — resemble fish tanks. Individuals see what the others are doing and decide which way they want to swim.

ADDED: Here's another problem relating that study of fish to human beings. Let's say that among those who've gotten educated about an issue 60% choose X and 40% choose Y, but the informed citizens are themselves only a small minority of the people, only 20%. Why is this 20% getting super-informed about an issue that 80% of the people are ignoring? These are unusual people. We shouldn't assume that the majority within that small percentage would be the majority if everyone were informed. The uninformed 80%, we're told, would tend to go along with the 60% of the 20%, but that doesn't necessarily correspond to what would be the true preference of the majority if all were informed. Of course, it doesn't make sense to posit a true preference for the majority on this hypothetical issue that only 20% of the people were willing to get educated about, since the people are defined by their lack of interest in that issue, and if they were to be transformed into people who are engaged and educated, they'd be different people, with different preferences.

"A 1-hour elementary school lesson on gender diversity featuring all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish caused a stir in Oakland..."

"... with conservative legal defense organizations questioning the legitimacy of the topic and providing legal counsel to parents who opposed the instruction. On Monday and today, Redwood Heights Elementary School students at every grade level were being introduced to the topic of gender diversity, with lesson plans tailored to each age group...  'That's a lot of variation in nature,' Gender Spectrum trainer, Joel Baum, told the students. ..."