So, I saw Ghostbusters again last night

holtzmann

I don’t usually do that, but a group of our summer research students were getting together to go, so I tagged along. I also had just read this review, and I wanted to try and see it through those eyes.

There is a moment, in the film’s climactic fight scene, when each of the Ghostbusters have exhausted their weapons and had a turn at battling the ever encroaching hoard of ghosts. One of the Ghostbusters, played by Kate McKinnon, remembers her last resort. She whips two hidden guns out of her proton pack, licks the barrel, and, with the Ghostbusters theme song wailing, absolutely DESTROYS every evil thing on screen, in one of the most amazing 30 seconds… 60 seconds? Eternity? Longest moments of my life.

She isn’t a princess. She isn’t a prop. She isn’t a love interest. She is the main character, in a movie with no other “greater” male main characters. She’s being a bad ass action hero, saving the day not for the happy ending kiss, but for herself and her friends and the world. But most importantly… and this is so, so very, very incredibly important: You can’t see her boobs while she does it.

Wait, let me repeat this: she’s a main character, an action hero, AND there’s no sexy impossible back bending moves in the scene that show off a tight catsuit or cleavage or the silhouette of her toned butt. She is not leaping all over the screen just to fuel all the fanboy’s fantasies later at home. She is not wearing sexy make up and she does not even have long hair that blows in the wind, still curled, after she defeats the bad guys. Kate McKinnon’s character saves the world in a dirty, baggy MTA jumpsuit.

I have to say that on a second viewing, the plot looks worse — it’s kind of an arbitrary mess that throws up hordes of ghosts for the heroes to zap. But that review is exactly right about what makes the movie work — it treats women as people.

Now that’s going to color all the other superhero movies that are inevitably going to pour onto the screen over the next few years, and I hope studio executives are noticing. The new movie playing at my local theater now is Suicide Squad, which I have very little interest in seeing for a lot of reasons, including the terrible reviews, but now I’m wondering…is Harley Quinn a human being in the story?

I want to turn this world upside down

Behold Eric Greitens, who is running for office in Missouri by advertising his ability to fire really big guns.

He’s getting millions in donations for his campaign.

Now here’s Daisy Ridley, who attended an event that recognized the victims of gun violence, and wrote this:

Thinking about how lucky I am like……… Serious bit: as I sat in the audience yesterday tears were streaming down my face at the tribute to those that have been lost to gun violence. I didn’t get a great picture of the incredible group that came on stage but they were so brave. It was a true moment of togetherness. We must ‪#‎stoptheviolence‬

Weeping at the useless deaths of so many people so strongly antagonized NRA fanatics that they hounded her off instagram.

I want to live in a world where the Eric Greitens are laughed at and don’t have a chance of being elected to office, and the humanism of the Daisy Ridleys is appreciated and praised.

This is not that world.

Mike Pence, creationist

In 2001, a French anthropologist discovered some very interesting specimens in West Central Africa: the skulls of some 6-7 million year old apes that showed some chimpanzee-like features and some human-like features. He called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

In 2002, Mike Pence used the bully pulpit of the house of representatives to denounce Sahelanthropus and the entire theory of evolution, in a pointless exercise of flouting his ignorance. Why, I don’t know; perhaps he thought he could use a scientific discovery to somehow legislate against science? The performance has been caught on video.

It’s an extended riff on the “just a theory” argument, revealing that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory means. He cites the 1925 Scope trial as the moment where this mere “theory” was legislated into the classroom and taught as fact; wrong. The Scopes trial was the result of a law that tried to prohibit teaching evolution, the side of science lost the case, and the theory has been taught in classrooms ever since because it is the best-supported explanation of the history of life. And evolution is a fact — life has not been static, but species change over time.

Then he claims that we all remember our classrooms illustrated with that linear portrayal of humans evolving from little monkeys to Mel Gibson. Well, I’ve been teaching for 30 years that that linear sequence is wrong, and that evolution is all about branching descent, which is also, as it happens, how Darwin thought about it (that popular Time-Life illustration is a true curse on evolution education).

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But I also challenge Pence on his claim that this portrayal was ubiquitous in classrooms. I had a public school education, in the liberal stronghold of King County, Washington, and never once heard the word “evolution” pass the lips of my teachers. What I learned about evolution before college I got from sneaking into the “Adult” section of the local public library, because this was a subject they didn’t even allow children to read about.

Pence reads about Sahelanthropus and claims to be surprised, that this represents a new theory that human evolution was taking place all across Africa and on the Earth. Uh, what? He also criticizes it because the textbooks will have to be changed, because the old theory of evolution…is suddenly replaced by a new theory.

I really want to play poker with Mike Pence. The astonishment on his face when the second hand dealt to him is different from the first will be something to behold. He will be aghast that the rules of poker get changed with every deal.

And then he gets to his point. Every theory is equivalent. We ought to also teach the theory that the signers of the declaration of independence believed — that humans were created by a creator. The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female he created them, and I believe that. He also thinks that scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe. Alas, scientists have scrutinized intelligent design explanations for a century or two now, and have generally found them to be useless crap.

It’s clear. Mike Pence is not only a babbling loon, but he’s a generic Biblical creationist who sees Intelligent Design creationism as a loophole to smuggle his religious ideas into the classroom. He’s wrong about virtually everything in that pompous little speech.

He’s lucky in one thing, though: he’s got Donald Trump boldly distracting most of the media from making any noise about Mike Pence’s incompetence and ignorance. Even without Trump, I don’t want this goober anywhere near high office.

A day in the life of a buffoon

This is just 24 hours of political campaigning by Trump. I’m impressed.

  • In a Washington Post interview, Trump declined to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan against his primary challenger
  • He reiterated that he hasn’t endorsed Sen. John McCain and said the onetime prisoner of war "has not done a good job for the vets"
  • He slapped out at Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, saying "she has given me zero support"
  • He suggested that Americans should pull their 401(k) funds out of the stock market
  • He said he’s "always wanted" to receive a Purple Heart but that having one gifted to him by a supporter was "much easier"
  • He said that the handling of sexual harassment has "got to be up to the individual"
  • He accused Khizr Khan of being "bothered" by his plan to keep terrorists out of the country, and said that he had no regrets about his clash with the family
  • He appeared to feud with a crying baby during a rally
  • He reiterated that "if the election is rigged, I would not be surprised"
  • The sitting president of the United States publicly called Trump "unfit to serve" and urged Republicans to withdraw their support for him.
  • Trump spokesman Katrina Pierson suggested that Obama and Clinton are to blame for the death of Humayan Khan, who died in 2004, when neither were in the executive branch at the time
  • An ally of Paul Manafort told our colleague John Harwood at CNBC that the campaign chairman is "mailing it in," leaving the rest of the staff "suicidal."
  • Sitting GOP congressman Richard Hanna, HP head Meg Whitman and former Christie aide Maria Comella all said they plan to vote for Hillary Clinton
  • The Washington Post released a transcript of its full interview with Trump, indicating among other things that he paused five times to watch TV coverage in the middle of the sit-down
  • A GOP source told NBC’s Katy Tur that Reince Priebus is "apoplectic" over Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan and is making calls to the campaign to express his "extreme displeasure"

This is a whole new level of incompetence. And he’s got three months more to top it!

It adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, “The Eagles are coming!”

There’s a webcam that has been watching a nest full of ospreys growing up, and the birds were almost ready to begin their flying lessons. Then…they get a visitor.

Is there a metaphor somewhere in this comment about America’s national bird?

The predation of an Osprey nest by an eagle might come as a surprise to many, but eagles are the ultimate opportunists. “They take what’s around and what’s available,” Kress says. And while the activity from the Audubon Camp located nearby usually keeps them away, in the end, “there’s nothing you can really do.”

Privilege! In action!

Suicide-Squad

In case you were wondering what has the spoiled man-babies up in arms lately, let me tell you. It’s not that the police have been murdering people, or that we aren’t doing anything about global warming, or that the Zika virus is becoming worrisome. Nope. It’s all about their entertainment.

Blizzard is cracking down on cheaters in their multiplayer game, Overwatch (which I haven’t played, although it looks fun). So people were loading up on mods that made the game easier for them, like adding code that auto-aimed their weapons for them. So Blizzard banned them for life from playing multiplayer.

The howls of outrage are amusing. They want to sue! They want to sic Anonymous on them! They paid good money for this game! They are being persecuted for their beliefs!

It reminds me so much of when I’ve caught cheaters on exams, especially the argument that they paid money for this class, so they deserve to pass it. No, you don’t. Bye.

One of their most anticipated movies, Suicide Squad, is getting bad reviews (I also have not seen this movie, but it’s opening in Morris this weekend). So they want a movie review site removed from the internet.

Here’s some news for you: everyone doesn’t have to like the same things you do to the same degree. I thought the new Ghostbusters was OK, the plot was nothing to rave about but the characters were good, and I got hate mail from people howling that we SJWs were unfairly propping up the movie and we should have been honest and hated it, like Milo did (curiously, the people who liked it better than I did are not damning me to eternal darkness).

I was disinclined to want to see Suicide Squad myself by the trailers — it looked like yet another excuse to showcase people in strange costumes demolishing a city with lots of explosions, and I’ve had enough of those already. Instead of complaining about bad reviews and trying to shut down reviewers, how about complaining about bad movies instead, and demanding some complex characters and relatable interactions in addition to the comic book destructive heroics?

You know, there’s nothing wrong with lobbying for entertainment you like. It’s just that these guys consistently lobby for the wrong things, things that would actually make their games and movies worse. I guess they just need their little hugbox where they can get cookies for being cheaters and for reveling in mindless violence.

Interestingly counter-intuitive

There are a few people I might like to fire into the heart of the sun, but I hadn’t realized how difficult that was. Here’s a video and simple simulator that lets you try to fire a rocket right into the sun. It took me a few tries to figure out how to do it — you have to launch directly opposite to the direction of Earth’s travel, and cancel out its velocity…and then it will fall into the sun. If you’re a fair bit off, it flies off into a new orbit around the sun that intersects with Earth’s orbit, which is not good. If you’re a teeny tiny bit off, it just scarcely grazes the sun, and then something cool happens: it slingshots around at tremendous velocity and flies off the screen.

I mostly sent rockets off to Alpha Centauri, or something, which is not quite as spectacularly destructive as slamming into a giant radioactive ball of plasma. But still good.

Heterochronic parabiosis is the new name for vampirism

FURY ROAD

As Caine mentions, wealthy Libertarian/Republican scumbag Peter Thiel sees great promise in the idea of parabiosis as a way to treat aging, which is just a little too on-the-nose for an overvalued parasite.

It actually works: some markers for aging are reduced in their effects with infusions of blood from younger donors, and it’s actually a promising technique, but not necessarily as a therapeutic treatment, as Thiel seems to think.

I’m not convinced yet we’ve found a single panacea that works. It’s possible there exist single-point things that could work. I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect. And so that’s … that is one that … again, it’s one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s and then it got dropped altogether. I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely underexplored.

The reason it was dropped, I think, is that no one saw a way to carry it forward into useful information. You have to understand that those old studies weren’t about just occasionally giving an old mouse a transfusion of blood from a young mouse — they actually stitched the two mice together in a way that allowed blood exchange between them for long periods of time and got a prolonged exchange of fluids, proteins, and cells. This is not practical as a human therapy, although it is very Mad Max.

But it worked! The old mouse in these experiments experienced multiple benefits.

The old parabiont benefits from not just young blood, but also the young organs: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, thymus, etc; and removal/neutralization by the young parabiont of negative metabolites, chemokines, etc. These together with improved blood oxygenation, normalized glucose/insulin and cholesterol profile are all likely to contribute to the rejuvenated tissue stem cells.

OK, sign me up! Any of you young bucks like to be surgically attached to me for a while, to give me a little pick-me-up? What if I were Peter Thiel and had some buckets of money to give you for this donation?

There might be some concerns. You ought to be asking, if old blood is so deficient that it could be improved by an infusion of my young blood, and if this actually transfers some effective anti-aging components, what happens to the young mouse? Remember, this is a continuous two-way exchange.

The young parabiont has to maintain an additional aged body with poorly functioning organs, inflammation, ongoing pathologies and perturbed immune responses, which could all contribute to the observed slight decline of the young stem cell responses.

Whoops. There might be a few ethical concerns here. Also, ick.

Also, these old experiments had the problem of sorting out exactly what was causing the anti-aging effect, and that was actually the intent of the experiments — to find potential proteins or cell types or other blood factors that might have a positive effect on older individuals. But the fact that these two mice were physically attached to one another also had complicated social effects.

The old parabiont has a much more stimulating environment when sutured with a young rather than an old partner. In contrast to the old and more sedentary animals, young mice are active and the old partner literally has to tag along. The pheromone landscape also becomes changed in hetero-, as compared to isochronic pairs. It is known that pheromones as well as environmental enrichment enhances, whereas environmental deprivation decreases neurogenesis and neuronal plasticity and “mock parabioses” have not been done to control for this.

So I might get the same effect from participating in youthful activities that I would from becoming a temporary conjoined twin with an 18 year old. So rather than undergoing surgery with me, maybe you should just go dancing with me? Except that even taking a grumpy old geezer to the dance club might have a deleterious effect on the poor young person I am afflicting.

So here’s the summary:

One conclusion from the heterochronic parabiosis studies is that the regenerative capacity of old tissue stem cells can be enhanced by the young systemic milieu; however, an over simplistic vision that using small volumes of young plasma or a “systemic silver bullet” will provide rejuvenation, e.g. one circulating molecule, at this point seems unlikely. Aging is a multi-genic process, the list of potential “silver bullets” is short, and some are oncogenic. Notably, while administration of small volume of young plasma to aged mice improved their cognition, the effects on brain or other tissue stem cells or health span have not been studied. Most importantly, the positive effects of young blood on old are only partial for muscle and the increase neurogenesis is nowhere near levels seen in young brain. Moreover the strong inhibition of young tissue stem cells by the aged systemic milieu in vivo and by old serum in vitro have been repeatedly reported. Summing up what is known, introducing small volumes of young plasma into an old host may not work effectively for enhancing tissue regeneration in the old, unless the inhibitory components of the aged circulation are neutralized or removed. And notably, removal or neutralization of these inhibitory systemic factors is predicted to have a positive effect on tissue repair by itself.

Get it? The parabiosis experiments that Thiel is thrilled by were not and cannot be part of a direct treatment approach; they were part of a series of experiments that hoped to identify blood proteins and cells that modulate the effects of aging. They are a first step to figuring out what is going on, and maybe, far down the road, figuring out how to treat the symptoms of aging. It’s a method for studying causes of aging, not necessarily treating them.

Let’s hope privileged billionaires don’t start strapping up young people to their veins to get imagined rejuvenation on the basis of their misunderstanding of science.