For shame, TEDx

I thought they were going to clean up their act and stop highlighting crackpots and kooks. But oh look: there’s Rupert Sheldrake, listing all the things he finds wrong about science. How could we possibly accept the dogma that matter is unconscious? Or that genetics is measurable and material?

What I found particularly galling in the video besides the smug arrogance of Sheldrake postulating idiocy is that the audience joins in and laughs smugly at his smug assertions.

“Genes are grossly overrated.” “Species have a collective memory, even crystals do.” “Everything depends on evolving habits, not fixed laws.” Gaaah.

Oh my god: his evidence that the constants of the universe are not constant is that the reported speed of light in 1920 was 20 meters/sec greater than it is now.

Bora 1, Climate Denialist Kooks 0

This is really a thing of beauty: climate pseudoscientist Willis Eschenbach whines at the inadvertent comedy blog Watt’s Up With That that Bora Zivkovic has been moderating comments on his SciAm blog.

Eschenbach, who’s also a Mass Extinction denialist, objects to Bora’s having instituted some basic anti-troll measures at A Blog Around The Clock that relegate comments with certain field marks of the climate denialist loon to the spam bin. Says Bora, in a passage that apparently made Eschenbach’s cranial temperature spike like a Warmist hockey-stick graph:

If I write about a wonderful weekend mountain trek, and note I saw some flowers blooming earlier than they used to bloom years ago, then a comment denying climate change is trolling. I am a biologist, so I don’t write specifically about climate science as I do not feel I am expert enough for that. So, I am gradually teaching my spam filter to automatically send to spam any and every comment that contains the words “warmist”, “alarmist”, “Al Gore” or a link to Watts. A comment that contains any of those is, by definition, not posted in good faith. By definition, it does not provide additional information relevant to the post. By definition, it is off-topic. By definition, it contains erroneous information. By definition, it is ideologically motivated, thus not scientific. By definition, it is polarizing to the silent audience. It will go to spam as fast I can make it happen.

What Eschenbach doesn’t mention, and a basic point of Bora’s post on how trolls derail substantive conversation, is that climate denialism is just the most pernicious and prevalent of a number of kinds of pseudoscience that have afflicted some of the sites on SciAm of late:

I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.

This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.

There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.

Eschenbach’s month-late response to Bora’s post is as pure and canonical a paean to the hallowed practice of JAQing off as I have seen. A sample:

I can only bow my head in awe. I mean, what better way is there to keep you from answering people from WUWT and other sites who might want answers to actual scientific questions, than not allowing them to speak at all?… See, Bora, the beauty of your plan is, you don’t even have to think about censorship once you do that. The computer does the hard work for you, rooting out and destroying evil thoughtcrimes coming from … from … well, from anyone associated with Watts Up With That, or with Steven McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit, or anyone that you might disagree with, or who is concerned about “alarmists”, you just put them on the list and Presto!

No more inconvenient questions!

I probably ought to feel sorry for Eschenbach: anyone who would proudly link to a piece like this alleged debunking of extinctions — as opposed to deleting it, salting the earth of the server on which it once resided, and denying under oath that you’d ever heard of the thing — is definitely more properly pitied than mocked. “No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause,” Eschenbach says. That’s some Time-Cube-level obliviousness.

But I can’t help snickering, and feeling slyly jealous that Bora was able to elicit a response like that just by mentioning idly that he’s keeping his own comment threads on topic despite a massive campaign by a few fanciers of metallic haberdashery to disrupt them. Well done, my friend. Well done.

Christian hypocrisy…no surprise at all

Here’s a sign of women’s progress: you can’t get fired by a Christian school for getting pregnant anymore. That’s against the law. Unfortunately, you can still be fired for fornicating, along with a few other things.

The way that Christian organizations try to get around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which bars firing women for pregnancy, is to claim they’re not firing them for the pregnancy, but for the fornicating. San Diego Christian College went another step by making employees sign a pledge requiring employees to abstain from "abusive anger, malice, jealousy, lust, sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex, adultery, pornography and homosexuality, evil desires and prejudice based on race, sex or socioeconomic status." Also, drinking, which means that Jesus would not be able to teach at this college established in his name.

Which does make me wonder how the school would respond if some woman got pregnant via artificial insemination or worse, in vitro fertilization. Test case, anyone?

That doesn’t help Teri James, though. She got fired from SDCC for getting pregnant the old-fashioned way, via <gasp> fornicating with a man. Escape clause met! College has an out and can get rid of the wicked woman!

Except…in a fit of the stupids to which adherents of ridiculous religions are prone, the college turned around and offered the job to a man. The man who fathered Teri James child. Who is, presumably by the symmetry of the act, a fornicator himself.

Unless this is one of those things where it’s IOKIYAM — it’s OK if you are male.

Pricing, hell: I’ll never understand airline seating policies

For instance, why do they never give me the seat next to the panda?

pandaplane

 

Must be a smart panda, as it’s sitting in the emergency exit aisle and they only let competent individuals capable of assisting others do that. Remember, in the unlikely event that the oxygen masks are released from the overhead panel, always help the panda affix her mask securely before putting on your own.

Via.

I’ll never understand airline pricing

So last month I registered for the Women in Secularism 2 conference in Washington, DC, reserved a hotel room, and went to book a flight out…and was shocked at the prices, roughly $500-$600, and some of the cheaper flights wanted to land me in Baltimore. It made no sense — I could fly to Seattle (and will be, later this month!) at a fraction of that price. So I didn’t book, and just waited.

And then I checked again today, and found lots of flights at half the original price. It’s like playing Calvinball, the rules just change at the airlines’ whims.

Anyway, yes, I’m going to flit into DC the morning of 17 May. How many of you will I be seeing at the event? Now might be a good time to arrange your flights, because who knows what the prices will be like tomorrow.

A charitable ethos

I very much enjoyed this TED talk by Amanda Palmer — she puts into practice a spirit of community that we would do well to foster, and which is actually at odds with many people’s attitudes. She’s talking about the music industry specifically but a way of life in general. Rather than trying to think of ways to make people pay for music, putting them in the cattle chute and compelling them to cough up the cash for the industry, she recommends asking and letting them pay, if they can and if they want.

I thought of Greta Christina when I saw that. Recall that when she went in for surgery, she asked for donations to help out…and people who valued her work and appreciated what she brought to the atheist community chipped in and freely gave. That was the work of community. That’s how it ought to work.

Palmer talks about the resentful people who would shout at her “get a job”…and they’re out there. Those are the people who didn’t give, who would bitterly denounce Greta for using money freely given as she saw fit. It’s a peculiar situation where true community is always going to be prone to parasites, but some people get so wrapped up in policing freeloaders that they end up destroying the community they intend to protect.

I think one of the hardest habits for people brought up in a society that dogmatically worships capitalism is to surrender a little bit and just give without expectation of compensation, and without demanding the right to retain control. They’ve rather lost sight of the meaning of the word “give”.

Quick! Let me correct one potential misapprehension in advance! I am not asking you to give to me, I’m not doing an Amanda Palmer move and offering you a flower and a moment of connection for a gift of compensation. I’m one of the lucky ones: I’ve got a secure job, live in an area with a low cost of living, have very good health insurance. I can do this blogging stuff, my own form of giving, without asking you to contribute directly to me. Some of you occasionally give me a small gift when we meet — a bit of squid art, a cupcake, a glass of beer — and that token is more than enough.

If you do feel a compulsion to give, I recommend you pass it on to one of the other bloggers here on FtB who do not have my good fortune of financial security, or alternatively, visit the Foundation Beyond Belief, where you can find plenty of outlets for your compassion.

Ha ha, Harvard!

This year, UMM will have Al Franken as our commencement speaker. Guess who Harvard gets?

nelson-ha-ha

A comment on the Crimson story got me poking around (I am not a big Oprah watcher) and now I wonder: Did anyone on the Harvard honorary degrees committee consider the fact that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudoscience? Four years ago Newsweek did an extensive debunking of pseudo-medicine pandered on her show. She was #1 on Brian Dunning’s list of the top 10 purveyors of pseudoscience, citing her as follows: “she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life.” Or read Martin Gardner’s take on Oprah — and her frequent guest, Harvard’s own Dr. Oz.

Score: UMM 1, Harvard -1,000,000.

What I taught today: heavy on the epistasis

Today we talked about gap genes and a little bit about pair rule genes in flies, and to introduce the topic I summarized genetic epistasis. Epistasis is a fancy word for the interactions between genes, and we’ve already discussed it on the simplest level. You can imagine that a gene A, when expressed, activates the expression of gene B. The arrow in this diagram? That’s epistasis.

epi1

So far, so simple. This could describe how bicoid activates zygotic hunchback for instance. But of course not all epistatic interactions are linear and one dimensional; often one transcription factor will turn on or repress multiple genes — so A might switch on genes B, C, and D.

epi2

But wait! Now there is the potential for all kinds of combinatorial interactions: maybe C has positive feedback back on A, and B activates D and C, and D activates B, and C represses B. There’s a whole mathematically bewildering world of possibility here.

epi3

And it gets worse and worse. B, C, and D could have downstream effects on other genes, like E, F, G, and H, and each of those interact with each other and can have feedback effects as well. It’s not at all uncommon to be taking apart the sequence of events of a developmental pathway and discover a whole tangled snarl of epistatic interactions that lead to complicated patterns of gene expression.

epi4

And that’s molecular geneticists and developmental biologists do: they try to tease apart the snarl, asking how each gene interacts with all the other genes in the system, working out the kind of genetic circuitry shown in those diagrams. Often the approach is take it one gene at a time: knock out F, for instance, and ask what happens to the expression patterns of A, B, C, D, E, G, and H. Or upregulate D, and ask what all those other genes do. If you like logic puzzles, you’ll love epistatic studies, because that’s what they are: grand complicated logic puzzles with multiple cascading effects and usually only partial knowledge about what each component does. You’ll either have great fun with it all, or cultivate great headaches.

So most of the class hour was spent going through examples of these puzzles. The gap genes, for instance, are expressed in broad stripes in the embryo, and we can try to decipher the rules that establish the boundaries by taking out components. If hunchback is deleted, what do the giant, krüppel, and knirps stripes look like? Take out krüppel, what happens to knirps? So I led them through this series of experiments, asking them to come up with general rules regulating the expression of each stripe, and then using those rules to predict what would happen if we did a different experiment. I think they mostly got it.

But of course the discussion today was mostly about the gap genes, which are the second tier of genetic interactions (analogous to my third figure above). Next I introduced the pair rule genes, the third tier, rather like my fourth diagram. These are genes that are expressed in alternating stripes corresponding to parasegments in the fly…so we’ve gone from a few broad stripes to many narrow stripes. Each of those stripes, too, is independently regulated, with distinct control regions for each.

The real nightmare begins in the next class, when we start taking apart the many ways all of the pair rule genes interact with each other, and how their position is established partly by regulation by the gap genes and partly by mutual sorting out with combinations of activating and repressing interactions. It’s going to be loads of fun!

Today’s slides.