Botany picture #116: Rhytidosporum procumbens

Rhytidosporum procumbens (Pittosporaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. I really have no prior connection to the family Pittosporaceae because they do not appear to occur in Germany. All the more important to learn more about them now that I am here. Many of them are shrubs but this is a rather weak, scraggly one.

Cycling in Canberra (cont.), oil

If you want any proof that a good number of car drivers here in Canberra simply despises cyclists, you do not have to look any further than their reaction to cyclists riding across zebra crossings.

A few days ago (I waited with writing this to get some distance, so it is less of a rant), I rolled down a hill towards a zebra crossing. There was one car that had already driven over it and several that were lined up in front of it, and none of them moved because this was a T-crossing and dense traffic was flowing along the bar of the T. So I rolled down the hill, across the crossing, and then stopped right behind it to wait for the lights to get green so that I could get across the bar of the T myself, if you get the picture.

Now the guy standing with his car right in front of the zebra crossing grew visibly upset when he saw me approaching. At first he made a half-hearted attempt to roll forward to block the zebra crossing so that I could not pass, but then he probably realized that that would be too irresponsible or prickish a thing to do and resigned himself to merely shouting at me.

Is that really necessary? Consider the situation.

• I did not slow him down by riding across because he was stuck in a traffic jam anyway.
• I did not endanger him, anybody else, and not even myself, which is generally the reason why cyclists are supposed to dismount before crossing, by riding across because he was stuck in a traffic jam anyway.
• I did not inconvenience him in any way whatsoever because he was stuck in a traffic jam anyway.

Although, perhaps the last one is not entirely correct. Let me try again: I would not have inconvenienced him in any way whatsoever if he had not been an unpleasant character who is viscerally offended by the sight of cyclists riding their bikes. Yes, that looks better. (If you are a kind person, you might submit that he is perhaps just a stickler for traffic rules. But sorry, no he can't be, because then he would not have tried to block the zebra crossing first.)

In this case his behavior was particularly stupid because he could not move anyway. The problem is a more general one though. What do you do when you come towards a zebra crossing when there is no traffic jam, when the cars stopping to let you cross could in principle be moving? Do you always dismount?

From my perspective, it is like this. I come towards the crossing, slow down and prepare to stop, and some car driver sees me. Because they know that somebody crossing the zebra crossing has right of way, they also slow down and stop (unless they are real pricks). Now I have two options: I can (1) stop entirely, laboriously dismount from my bike, and push it across, or (2) wave a thank you to the car driver and quickly ride across. The thing is, which option makes the car driver angry will depend on their personality.

Somebody like Mr I-Hate-Cyclists from above will want me to dismount, so if I don't do so, he will shout abuse at me. If I do so, experience shows he will most likely use the time I need to dismount to run the crossing and deny me my right of way.

Nice and sensible car drivers, on the other hand, will not mind me riding across because that allows them to continue their own journey as quickly as possible. If instead I dismount, they will most likely think to themselves, "what an idiot, why doesn't he just ride across instead of walking across, taking five times as long? There is no danger, I already stopped for him!"

In other words, I could facilitate the flow of traffic while antagonizing unreasonable people, or I could slow myself and everybody else down while antagonizing reasonable people. That is not really a conundrum, is it?

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Also a few days ago, I had a chat with two reps of a producer of lab consumables. It turns out that oil is so expensive now that companies (not them of course, that was their pitch) are producing shoddier plastic consumables, trying to use less high quality oil and to replace it with cheap substitutes. And some of these substitutes leach into the tube and interfere with scientific measurements and molecular reactions.

Quite apart from the question of how we will manage food production for several billion people, transport, electricity, and heating when the fossil fuels are gone, just consider this small issue, materials science. Look around your living room, around a supermarket, around a scientific lab. What the heck will we do once we cannot produce plastic anymore? Can you even imagine that?

Please remind me again why the use of petrol-powered private cars has not been outlawed worldwide ca in the early 1980ies, because sorry, somehow I don't get it. We are all sawing off the branch on which we are sitting, and we cannot even pretend we don't know.

Botany picture #115: Triptilodiscus pygmaeus

Triptilodiscus pygmaeus (Asteraceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. As one can see from my finger tip, this daisy species well deserves its specific epithet.

New South Walesian geography

The following may be considered quite impolite but some time I just have to say it: The Australians here in this area are just weird with their approach to geography. We are in Canberra and thus, although the city has its own territory, essentially embedded in New South Wales (NSW). And talking about localities in NSW with Australian colleagues is a constant struggle.

You see, when they tell you that a species of plants occurs at the "south coast", they do not, in contrast to what anybody outside of Australia would reasonably surmise, mean a coast that does anything so base as actually being situated on the southern edge of any land mass you might be thinking of. You would thus waste your time if you were attempting to locate this plant species on the coasts of Victoria or South Australia.

No, here in NSW, Sydney is the navel, the pole, the hub of the world, the focus of all thought. So obviously (?) to a local, the "south coast" is the coast of NSW south of Sydney, and the "north coast" is the coast of NSW north of Sydney. The fact that both are really the east coast relative to land and ocean is apparently a minor detail, and people can get quite exasperated if you are unkind enough to point it out. Of course this makes it much harder to communicate when you really do need to say that something occurs on the southern coast (for reals) of the continent, but I have by now gotten used to dealing with this particular weirdness.

Recently I had an even more bizarre exchange. A colleague came back to work and told me that she had spent the extended weekend visiting relatives in a town in "western NSW". After she mentioned the nice wildflowers there I asked her to show me the town on the map because the interior of the state has many interesting species of the group I am working on. So when we stood in front of the map, my finger and eyes quickly focused on the western half of NSW but I could not find the town.

The joke was on me! As it turns out, the town is literally in the easternmost fifth of the state. But of course, as I learned from the aforementioned colleague, that is still western NSW. Presumably because it is just slightly west of the ridge of the Great Dividing Range or something. Again, the fact that this place is nearly as far east as you can get in NSW without falling into the Tasman Sea is a minor detail, and she was quite surprised at the misunderstanding.

Admittedly, when I was a child everything south of the Elbe river felt to me as if it weren't really northern Germany any more. But well, when I thought like that I was what, 10 years? And even then I would not actually have called Lower Saxony "southern Germany"...

Botany picture #114: Diuris

Diuris (Orchidaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. This genus is known as donkey orchids although individual species may also be tiger, leopard or whatever other animal orchids. Sadly they look too similar for me to determine them to species just from this picture.

In practice, people are determinists anyway

Jerry Coyne once more raises the issue of free will, about which I have also written before, so I do not want to repeat myself. Instead, let us look at some of the premises of the discussion. It appears as if the motivation of incompatibilists is founded on the following assumptions:

1. If left to their own devices, people are naturally leaning towards a black/white dichotomy of dualism versus incompatibilism, i.e. they believe that the only possible meaning of "free will" is some kind of supernatural or libertarian free will that allows people to do whatever they want independent of their genes, upbringing, personality, current state of brain chemistry, and whatever other influence of the natural environment you may want to add. In other words, when you say "free will" everybody will assume you believe in supernatural stuff.
2. If one could only convince people of the truth of determinism and incompatibilism, if they could only be convinced that there is no free will, they would become better people. For example, revenge would not make sense any more if it were understood that a criminal is the sum of their genes and experiences and thus never had any really free choice in committing their crime.
3. If one could only convince people of the truth of determinism and incompatibilism, that would be a mighty blow to religion, at least partly because religious apologists use free will as a standard defense for the so-called problem of evil.

The thing is, there seems to be some good evidence that all three of these assumptions might be wrong.

Botany picture #113: Glossodia major

Glossodia major (Orchidaceae), Australian Capital Territory, 2013. One of the most spectacular orchids here but also one of the most frequent. The entire plant above ground consists of only one leaf and one flower.