Superbrains will not come out of a test tube

mccoysbrain

Stephen Hsu thinks super intelligent humans are coming. He thinks this because he’s very impressed with genetic engineering (he’s a physicist), and believes that the way to make people more intelligent is to adjust their genes, and therefore, more gene tweaking will lead to more intelligent people, inevitably. And not just intelligent, but super-intelligent, with IQs about 1000, even though he has no idea what that means, or for that matter, even though no one really knows what an IQ of 100 means. We’re going to figure out all the genes that are involved in intelligence, and then we’ll just turn the knob on each one of them up to their maximum, and boom, super-humans.

Good god, what a load of crap. Lots of people seem to think it’s brilliant, though. It isn’t.

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Mary’s Monday Metazoan: Trouble-making immigrants

Mostly, the killer whales native to Puget Sound are salmon eaters. But there are also transient orca who cruise through the Sound, and their diets may be a bit more adventurous. And then this week the gray whales were passing by, and…uh-oh. Gang fight.

orcavsgrey

It’s that time of year.

The Great Migration of 22,000 Eastern North Pacific grays is well underway. As spring approaches, these massive creatures, which can reach 50 feet and 40 tons, begin an epic journey of between 5,000 and 6,800 miles from the warm-water calving lagoons in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and Gulf of California to the Bering and Chukchi Seas, traveling constantly at about five knots and averaging 75 miles per day. It’s the longest migration of any mammal on Earth. Midway through the journey, from late February to the end of May, a small group makes a pit stop in Puget Sound — for the shrimp buffet.

“Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it’s about corruption.”

It’s too much. The sheer volume of the Panama Papers may make its message indigestible — 2.6 terabytes of data? Of accounting data? It’s not exactly the kind of thing I’m going to crack open to read before bedtime.

But this summary of the initial disclosures is helpful.

* Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.

* A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.

* Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.

* Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets. The families of at least eight current and former members of China’s supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore.

* Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca. Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions.

* A key member of Fifa’s powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football’s scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption.

That’s just the early disclosures as people start wading through it all. There are rumors that some Americans are going to be implicated in the corruption, too…just give them time.

Another factor that may make this fizzle, besides the overwhelming volume, is that nobody is going to be surprised by any of it. Are any of you at all surprised that rich and influential people of the world are also sleazy, rotten, tax cheats?

We should all be outraged at the misuse of science against women

sexpunnett

I just told you about my brief history with the gaming community. I drifted away from it into something else, and that something else also shaped the way I think about these feminist issues. I became a scientist. And worst of all, my trajectory started with neuroscience, and led me into developmental biology and genetics, and then on to evolution, and I’ve got to tell you, those subjects…it’s almost as if they were designed to put you on a collision course with feminist concerns. Just think, I could have gone into physics or chemistry and avoided thinking about sex and gender altogether…until, of course, I noticed the humanity of my colleagues.

What brought this on is an excellent article on the history and genetics of the sex chromosomes. Two things leapt out at me, in part because they confirmed something I’ve been trying to teach my students for years.

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The Orcs never go away

Orc_Kim

I was a gamer 40 years ago (I wouldn’t call myself one now, unless “plays games occasionally” is definitive of an identity other than “human being”). Back then, games were all played on a table top, with dice or cardboard markers or even miniature painted soldiers. Sure, there was Pong, and a few other electronic games that involved moving dots and squares on a screen, but we thought of those as games in the same sense that War was a card game.

Even then, although I wasn’t really conscious of it, gaming was almost an entirely male hobby. Why, I didn’t know: I’d drop into the gaming shop in North Seattle or the one near the university in Eugene, and all the familiar stereotypes would be there: the blustering neckbeard, the socially awkward obsessive nerd, the middle-class collector, the history buff. They were all guys. People who walked in who didn’t fit into the categories were sneered at and made to feel inferior, which was part of the elite mystique of being a grown man playing with toys.

That started to change with Dungeons & Dragons, which brought in a more diverse clientele. There were girls who liked to play that. I can’t even imagine the tremors that shook the manly enclaves of the local gaming store when Pokemon and Magic, the card games, became popular — my kids were into that and I saw lots of girls joining in.

I moved on from the gaming world after college, so I missed most of the difficulties in the transition from a boys club to a slightly more open environment (which is obviously still going on, and still causing tremendous anxiety among many delicate male flowers). But here’s a woman describing her experiences in this community. It’s ugly.

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Hypocrisy to the fourth power

Jud McMillin has resigned from his position as a Republican representative in the Indiana legislature. I know this bothers you — another promising political career cut short — but the hypocrisy of this one is positively enthralling. Rarely does a politician engage in such furious foot-shooting.

  • He’s resigning because he sent explicit sex videos recorded on his cell phone to a large number of people. Oh, excuse me, his cell phone was stolen and “his cellphone sent a sexually explicit video to an unknown number of recipients”. This is what the passive voice was intended for by the good Lord Above, people!

  • This is the second time he’s resigned because of the escape of sexually explicit images of himself from his phone (AI researchers: look into this. It may be a sentient device). He previously resigned from his job as an attorney because he’d been taking advantage of a client who was a victim of domestic violence. How did he get elected to high office after that? I don’t know. Indiana?

  • A highlight of his legislative record was working to pass a “2015 “religious freedom” law allowing businesses to ban gay customers”. Because, of course, he’s very concerned about public and private morality, since God frowns upon men who touch penises, except of course, when that man is making a masturbation video to send to his mistress. Oh, wait, I just got kneemail from Jesus, and he says Dad disapproves of that, too.

  • I think this one should count as irony, rather than hypocrisy: he also helped stall a bill to outlaw revenge porn, so any Hoosiers who have copies of his porn video, there’s nothing but your conscience to prevent you from disseminating it wildly. And if you’re the kind of person McMillin counts as a friend, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of those!

But don’t you worry about Jud, he has announced that he is resigning to spend more time with his family. You all know about Republican families, right? The family is a versatile institution that both provides an excuse to sanctimoniously moralize at the public, and acts as a perfect, untouchable refuge when you’re caught violating your own moral code.

spiritual but not religious

Just think. You’re sitting at home (or possibly sleeping in), playing video games or surfin’ the web (or possibly taking care of that horrible stack of grading glowering at you on your desk), when you could be attending the Church of the Spiritual But Not Religious.

Doesn’t that look like fun and a great way to spend a Sunday morning?

I might need something to excuse procrastination and putting off grading, but I don’t think I’ll stoop that low.

Stop citing Newslo or Politicops or Ifyouonlynews, please

They are not trustworthy news sites. They throw in satire and outright lies mingled with straight news, so that it becomes difficult to sort them out.

Here’s the latest that is suddenly popping up all over my social media. Louie Gohmert is a goddamn dumbass who says some of the most godawful stupid crap, and these “news” sites are highlighting a recent speech complaining about a bill that would support women in STEM careers. They “quote” him from his speech:

Gohmert also added that “women were created for one thing and one thing alone,” as well as that “we are insulting the Lord by allowing women to act like men.” “Women are beautiful creatures, no doubt about that. We marry them, we look after them, we provide for them and we love them, but that does not mean they are the same as us. It is the job of a woman to stay at home, to maintain the household, to bear children and look after them after they’re born. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say that women should be chasing after fancy titles and knowledge. The only knowledge they need is the one we men allow them to have.”

Outrageous, yes? Incredibly idiotic? It sure is. Only one problem: he didn’t say any of that. Really, I’d love to catch this fool saying something so blatantly inane, and so would a lot of other people…which Newslo relies on, so they made up the quote. Some of the cites quoting Newslo even include a video of the talk, which they apparently never bothered to listen to, because those words aren’t in there.

He says a lot of other stupid crap in there: he somehow thinks Martin Luther King Jr. would oppose the bill, because it discriminates on the basis of something other than the content of the character. He seems to think that racism is over. He is very concerned that supporting women in science would harm boys. And he riffs ridiculously on the idea that it sure is good that Marie Curie was not supported by this bill, because it promotes entrepreneurship, and apparently government support for that would somehow deprive women of the ability to do basic research. Gohmert is one of the lowest wattage bulbs in congress and needs to be shuffled away somewhere where he can’t do any more harm, but he did not say what was quoted.

There are lots of these lying “news” sites out there that rely on making shit up to stir up interest, because apparently the real idiocy going on in the Republican party is just not enough. Shut them off.

And jebus, if you’re going to quote something from a video, watch the video first to see if it’s actually in there.

Paint like an Egyptian

I knew that ancient sculptors would paint their statues, rather than leaving them as plain stone, as we usually see them — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for instance, is adorned on the outside with classical-style sculptures painted in lifelike colors, and they are amazing. It’s too bad the colors of winged Nike and Venus de Milo and all those statuary busts aren’t restored as well.

Pediment_Philly_Art_Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing something interesting, though. Egyptian art was also painted in bright colors, so what the Met is doing with the Temple of Dendur is painting it with light, using projection mapping, to hint at what it looked like in its glory days.

Gorgeous. I want to see it. I want a time machine so I can really see what it was like, too.

It’s too early in the morning to peek at the ugly underbelly of the internet

Thanks, Dave Futrelle! Now I’m sleepy and nauseated!

It seems that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulous (and an army of unmentioned, unpaid interns), those darlings of the discredited ‘news’ site, breitbart.com, have churned out a defense of the alternative right. It’s tedious and stupid and tries very hard to gloss over reality, but here’s Shorter Breitbart:

We aren’t racists, we’re just frustrated intellectuals who enjoy shit-posting!

Hilariously, the Daily Stormer has responded. Shorter Stormer:

We are too racists, and we hate you degenerate gay jew-boys and mud people! Heil Hitler!

A pox on you both.

I’d go back to bed, but now I’m wide awake and disgusted.