[lit-ideas] Re: Will they darken the skies once more?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:02:58 -0400 (EDT)
More from the link provided by C. Bruce:
"Then, Pigeon Martha -- named after Martha Washington, the country's first
First Lady -- finally met her end at around noon on Sept. 1, 1914. She was
the last surviving specimen in an unsuccessful program to breed the birds
in captivity."
Cfr. Gr*ce, "Vacuous Names." ("The king of France is bald", "Pegasus does
not fly").
---
Interlude:
Analyse, alla Kripke, statements of the form, using Russell/Whitehead,
Principia Mathematica:
i. The Passenger Pigeon or Wild Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) is an
extinct North American bird.
(Kripke: "Sentences like 'Socrates is called "Socrates" ' are very
interesting and one can spend, strange as it may seem, hours talking about
their
analysis. I actually did, once, do that. I won't do that, however, on this
occasion. (See how high the seas of language can rise. And at the lowest
points too.)")
-- end of interlude.
"In elementary school, Novak completed a project on the dodo, the extinct
bird species from Mauritius", which should please Ritchie and Coward
(author of "Not yet the dodo").
""We caused the extinction of the species," says the 26-year-old [Novak]
"Now we have a moral obligation to bring them back.""
-- but perhaps, pace Omar K., not a right?
"Chickens in a Duck's Egg. The procedure is not only complicated, but also
largely untested."
Or as Popper would prefer, unfalsified.
"Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan."
Or as Witters would say, "We would not understand her."
Incidentally, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, if you've seen it ("and
even if you haven't," as Popper would rectify) is located on the UC Berkeley
campus, in the Valley Life Sciences Building, on the 3rd floor, entrance at
room 3101.
Ben Novak is a passenger pigeon expert now working full time on the
project, supported by Revive & Restore.
He has joined the lab of Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary molecular biologist
at UC Santa Cruz, to refine the sequencing of passenger pigeon DNA and
compare it with the DNA of the extinct bird’s closest living relative, the
band-tailed pigeon.
He is related to Hollywood actress, Kim Novak.
"She was born in Chicago. Her parents, like mine, were of Czech descent."
"I read Gr*ce's method in evolutionary biology. While not exactly
_enhancing_ my project, he _implicated_ it."
--- "If I were not in Santa Cruz, I would be studying his unpublications at
the Bancroft Library." "Or not," he added.
On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known Passenger Pigeon, died in the
Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Martha's body was frozen into a block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian
Institution, where it was skinned, dissected, photographed and mounted.
Currently, Martha (named, incidentally, after Martha Washington, the spouse
of George Washington, president of America) is in the museum's archived
collection, and "not on display", the director of the museum politely stated.
A memorial statue of Martha stands on the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoo --
it is of the realistic type, sculpted by an American student of Rodin.
John Herald, a bluegrass singer wrote a song dedicated to Martha, titled
"Martha: Last of the passenger pigeons". It's in F minor.
The song, as it title implicates, tells the story about the Passenger
Pigeon's extinction and Martha's life in her cage in Cincinnati Zoo.
Cheers,
Speranza
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