Penalize ALL the TikTok psychics

One of the worst things I can imagine happening in my world is the death of a student. These are our charges, we get to know them and feel responsibility for them, and the pain of loss is deeply felt. Even worse is when students die violently. They’re young, and should have a long life ahead of them.

The second worst thing would be for a teacher to be falsely accused of killing a student, especially when there is no evidence suggesting such a thing. It’s more than a civil and criminal accusation, it’s morally villainous.

In 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were brutally murdered. This was a heinous act without excuse. The man who did it was arrested, confessed, convicted, and was sentenced to life in prison. In the wake of the murders, though, a woman named Ashley Guillard was riding high on social media, claiming to know who the killer was on the basis of her psychic powers and making TikTok video after TikTok video declaring that the tarot cards told her that a history professor at the University of Idaho, Rebecca Scofield, had been having an affair with one of the victims and had had them all killed.

Before authorities arrested Kohberger in late December 2022 in connection with the victims’ brutal stabbing deaths, Guillard published videos on the TikTok platform baselessly alleging Scofield had engaged in a romance with one of the four people slain.

Guillard – who is a resident of Houston, Texas, and described herself as a psychic crime solver on her TikTok account – accused Scofield on camera of ordering the quadruple murder to hide her relationship with one of the victims. She cited tarot card readings as evidence to support her unfounded theory.

It was a ludicrous accusation. Flipping cards in Texas will not tell you who the perpetrator of a crime in Idaho was, but apparently making inflammatory accusations without evidence was Guillard’s only claim to fame, and she profited off the attention she got for lying about people. Her slanders finally caught up with her, though: Scofield sued and won a $10 million award from her.

In a June 6, 2024, order, a federal judge sided with Scofield, ruling that the internet personality’s statements were defamatory and based “only” on her “spiritual intuition about the murders” — not “any objective basis.”

The judge also noted that Guillard’s social media posts continued even after the Moscow Police Department issued a press release in December 2022 stating that Scofield was not a suspect in the murder investigation.

Now Guillard is crying and calling the ruling Unfair!. Too bad. Slap her down hard, teach her that you can’t profit off false accusation. If she wants to complain about anything, it’s that TikTok has incredibly lax policies about enforcing rules and rights online. If you enthusiastically charge into a wild wild West of lawlessness and you get gunned down in a shootout, you don’t get to blame someone else.

Let’s extend the verdict. Anyone making factual claims on the basis of tarot cards, psychic powers, or Bible prophecy are charlatans who ought to face the full weight of the law when their claims harm people. Stupid people babbling on social media are small potatoes — go after the people who claim that politicians have divine favor because a god whispered in their head that they must be supported in even their most damaging actions. Prosecute those who claim to wage holy war first of all.

Losers

I am encouraged by the defeat of Victor Orban in Hungary. I’m happy for the people of Hungary throwing off the yoke of fascism and having hope for the future, and for the people of Europe as a whole building a stronger alliance.

But I’m selfish. I’m also happy to see JD Vance flop hard; it was unbelievable to me that Republicans from America were campaigning for Orban. Vance was politicking for Orban just recently, as part of his personal campaign to appear ‘presidential,’ and many right-wingers have been on the Orban train for a long, long time. The Hungarian election was a harbinger of the American elections to come, and the message is clear: Vance is a loser. Republicans are losers. Trump is a loser. They should be nervous, because they’re all just waiting for the axe to fall.

Down, down, in the dark

Shirtsleeve weather, the sun is shining bright, and there are stirrings in the darkness. I prowled about my yard, searching for spiders, but the best I could find was spider-sign — they’re out and about, leaving strands of silk in crevices and corners, but I saw none.

That is, until I turned to the ever-reliable compost bin. I found even more silk everywhere in there, but to find an inhabitant I had to bend over and stick my head upside down deep into the bin, way down low until I was look just above the edge of the decaying plants, and there at last I found one, a familiar old friend, Steatoda borealis.

S. borealis is entirely black in body color, and she was on the side of a black bin, in shadow, deep in darkness, so getting any kind of photo was difficult. But there she was, my first Theridiidae of the new season.

This compost bin is a favored spot. I think they snuggle down in the layers of rotting glop and overwinter there, and then they’re the first to reappear once the weather well and truly breaks. It’s kind of sweet to think of them sleeping down in the dark, in the mulch, all winter long, waiting to reemerge.

I’ve got homework for you

OK, gang, help me out here. I’m swamped today — my morning is destroyed because I have to go in to the clinic for my annual thorough extensive physical check-up, and I get out just in time for my afternoon class, and then I’m free, sort of. Except that I have to compose a 10 question online quiz on chromosome variations.

So give me some good questions on deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations. Preferably questions that can be easily machine-scored, but I do throw in an essay question or two.

Get to work. I’ll expect them in the comments section here when I get back at 1:30.

Don’t disappoint me.

Genetics progress

Today was a lab day, and I’m happy to report that the students have achieved perfection. Every fly bottle was beautiful, full of maggots and pupae, and not one hint of contamination among them all. And so many pupae already! This is excellent news, because next week swarms of adult F2 flies will emerge and the students will have to score and count them all to finish this mapping cross.

Score. And count. ALL. Next week’s lab will require extra time to complete, and I let them know that today. It’s been typical to count 10-15,000 flies in the final cross in this class, but I don’t expect that many this year (it’s a small class of only 8 students*), and I don’t grade them on raw numbers but on how well they analyze and interpret the numbers they do get. I think this experiment will be ending on a high note, at least, and the maggoty-side will be over next week, leaving them two weeks to put together a lab report.

I also committed the students to a specific in-class presentations on the 27th of April, the last week of class. We really are winding down.

*8 is an unusually low number of students — we hit a trough in enrollment numbers a few years ago. I wouldn’t mind classes this small every year, but I suppose we need a larger enrollment to sustain the university. I see good signs for the future**: my cell biology course in the Fall is nearly full, and registration isn’t quite over yet.

**I would like to have my final year here, the 2026-2027 academic year, be a bountiful year. I’d like to exit with a good term.

Not funny

I did not like this Far Side cartoon for obvious reasons.

This could do real harm, burning the victim’s neck, and if I caught anyone doing this they would be immediately expelled from the lab. Not funny.

Additionally, I have a personal memory of my first year in general chemistry. I had a lab partner who was a total klutz — I carried her through that lab, in spite of her inability to titrate anything. She was a danger with a pipette, and every week I’d go back to the dorm to discover that somehow the back of my pants and shirt had been spattered with acids — when I’d do my laundry I’d discover all these holes in my clothes, which was also not funny.

I’ve wondered for years if my lab partner really disliked me, or if she was trying to get my attention because she liked me, or she was just ridiculously incompetent in the lab. It happened so often that I suspect the first possibility.

The dumb ones keep coming back

Some of you may recall a particularly obnoxious commenter who called himself Jinx McHue, among other names — he was one of those who made stupid comments, got banned, and then tried to make multiple appearances under different pseudonyms, and got banned for each one. I guess he’s still reading, because he tried to comment again, but he got blocked, as usual. But maybe you’d be entertained by his attempt?

So, you’re mad when he threatens to nuke Iran, but then you turn around and are mad when he doesn’t. You people are dumber than he is.

He doesn’t get it. Yes, we’re mad that he threatened to nuke Iran, because that would be evil and criminal. No, we’re not mad that he didn’t nuke Iran. We’re mad that he’s trying to implement international diplomacy by making evil, criminal threats and bragging about maybe doing war crimes.

I wonder…was he happy when he made the threat, or happy when he didn’t follow through?

Life from space? I have questions

Samples have been analyzed from two carbonaceous chondrites in space, Ryugu and Bennu, and they’ve been found to contain common organic molecules, specifically, the building blocks of DNA. That’s cool, not particularly surprising, and it’s good stuff to know…but then we get all these pop science articles speculating that life came from space. No, no, no — it tells us that these organic molecules are universal, that they can be assembled by all kinds of physical/chemical processes, and that nucleotides (for instance) do not require synthesis by living organisms. Chemistry is everywhere, but biology isn’t. Unfortunately, these kinds of observations always provoke people to babble about life, or at least the ingredients for life, falling from space. I don’t buy it.

Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens the case that the ingredients for life are abundant in the solar system and may have found their way to Earth from space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

OK, yes, it’s quite likely that some organic molecules fell to Earth from outer space. But please, think a little bit quantitatively. There are clouds of organic molecules in space, but they are incredibly diffuse and poorly concentrated. There are asteroids that are made of condensed lumps of carbon with richer concentrations of these molecules, but they are drifting in the vast empty volumes of space, and only occasionally falling to Earth, adding droplets of nucleotides to the Earth’s oceans.

Meanwhile, the Earth itself is a gigantic crucible containing 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water, with a complex pattern of heating and cooling, and immeasurable interactions with minerals and other organic molecules. It is a far weightier contributor to biochemistry than a thin, almost undetectable, vapor of scattered molecules in space. But these stories always get excited about the thin vapor rather than the fact that Earth itself is a rich churning cauldron of geochemistry that is going to be far more responsible for the wealth of biologically relevant chemistry we find ourselves swimming in.

This is not to discount how interesting these asteroid analyses are. They’re telling us that natural, unguided mechanisms can produce the biomolecules that make up life. The asteroids, though, are not likely to be where they originated here, on planet Earth, which is already a great place for building them.

The article says something else that irritated me.

Now, following the discovery of all five nucleobases in the Bennu pebbles, Koga and his colleagues have found the complete set in Ryugu. The findings lend weight to the so-called “RNA world” model of abiogenesis. In this hypothesis, early life on Earth depended solely on RNA as a self-replicating molecule, laying the biological groundwork for later, more complicated systems that involved DNA and protein-based organisms. The extraterrestrial samples from Ryugu and Bennu provide evidence that at least some of the nucleobases that made up these early lifeforms came from outer space.

No, this observation says nothing relevant to the RNA World hypothesis. It neither confirms nor refutes it. Nucleobases exist, we’ve known that for a long, long time, but I don’t believe that the earliest life on Earth depended solely on RNA, and finding nucleobases in a lifeless rock is not evidence that life was solely spawned from those few components. Were there no other molecules in them? No sugars, no amino acids, no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, no carboxylic acids? There are a great many complex organic molecules found bubbling in the soup of our oceans, aren’t they a more likely source of life than a dead lump that’s been floating in space for billions of years?

Sorry. It’s a good bit of science, but I get cranky when I read these ill-informed unwarranted speculations that ignore more substantial science.

He always chickens out. Good.

Trump talked to some Pakistani leaders, and that was good enough. He has announced a ceasefire.

President Donald Trump said he’d agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday, less than two hours before his 8 p.m. deadline to destroy a “whole civilization.”

Trump said the ceasefire agreement was made on the condition that Iran agree to reopen the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!, Trump posted on Truth Social.

The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East, Trump wrote.

See? He thinks he won already. Iran said nothing.

How about if we just ignore him from now on and focus on the Epstein files and getting him out of office?