Oh my god, I’ve been in Minnesota for too long

Because I started drooling and making strange guttural noises when I read this story of a remote-controlled 3-D printed snowblower. I was having these mind-blowing fantasies of sitting in my home office with a joystick, clearing my driveway while sitting in warmth and comfort.

(Turn the volume down, you don’t need to hear the awful cacophony of the soundtrack to this clip)

I don’t have a 3D printer, and I probably couldn’t afford the kind of model that would suffice for that thing, so why doesn’t someone come out with a pre-assembled version for sale? I’m not sure this one has enough oomph to handle the mountain ranges of snow that the snowplows drop across our driveway, but it could probably handle our sidewalks.

On second thought, maybe it would be nice to have one where I could just print up damaged parts as I need them. Our existing manual snowblower is currently laid up with a cracked gas tank, and having one I could fix on the spot would be so handy.

Behe’s polar bears

Michael Behe has a problem: he uses polar bears as an example of how “damaging” a gene can have an advantageous effect. As Nathan Lents explains:

Behe offers them as an example of how harming genes can help an organism and lead to adaptive evolution. Imagine an ancestor bear population that looked pretty much like brown bears. Then came some random mutations that reduced the production or deposition of pigment into the fur of the bears. This made the bears white and – voilà! – the bears acquired natural camouflage in snowy climates so as to better sneak up on their prey.

This seems like a pretty straightforward example and most people will simply take it at face value. Behe jumps from this example to his claim that this is all that unguided mutations can do. However, even in this apparently “pro-Darwinism” example, Behe exaggerates his claims and misrepresents what science has actually revealed. The evolution of polar bears was not only a matter of harmful mutations.

The first part is fine: there are all kinds of ways a genetic change can produce an adaptive phenotype, and downregulating a gene is one of them. It’s the second part that’s the problem. Behe leaps from a few examples to an assertion that this is a universal rule, which is not the case. Lents shows another example in polar bears.

Look at those polar bears, slurping down all those sugary soft drinks. It’s a little known fact that they’re using Coca-Cola to wash down their diet of fatty, blubbery seals, and they pretty much eat nothing but meat and fat, which, if any of us tried the Polar Bear Diet, we’d be dead of coronary disease in short order. It would be interesting to know how these animals cope with a diet high in cholesterol and fats, so Lents cites a paper that looked at the molecular sequence of apolipoprotein B (APOB), a protein that is important in the transport of fats in the blood, and compared it to that of brown bears. Surprise — the form found in polar bears is better at clearing fats from the bloodstream.

Substantial work has been done on the functional significance of APOB mutations in other mammals. In humans and mice, genetic APOB variants associated with increased levels of apoB are also associated with unusually high plasma concentrations of cholesterol and LDL, which in turn contribute to hypercholesterolemia and heart disease in humans (Benn, 2009; Hegele, 2009). In contrast with brown bear, which has no fixed APOB mutations compared to the giant panda genome, we find nine fixed missense mutations in the polar bear (Figure 5A). Five of the nine cluster within the N-terminal ba1 domain of the APOB gene, although the region comprises only 22% of the protein (binomial test p value = 0.029). This domain encodes the surface region and contains the majority of functional domains for lipid transport. We suggest that the shift to a diet consisting predominantly of fatty acids in polar bears induced adaptive changes in APOB, which enabled the species to cope with high fatty acid intake by contributing to the effective clearance of cholesterol from the blood.

Clearly, the authors do not expect the polar bear APOB to be “broken.” Rather, a bare majority of the amino acid changes are in the most important region for the clearing of cholesterol from the blood. In other words, these mutations likely enhance the function of apoB, at least when it comes to surviving on a diet high in saturated fats.

So APOB in polar bears isn’t broken at all. It does carry mutations relative to brown bears, but they haven’t resulted in reduced functionality at all — quite the opposite, actually.

Lyndon LaRouche is dead!

I found him repellent, so I didn’t know much about him, except that I’d occasionally encounter one of his rabid pamphleteers, he’d sometimes appear on the news during election years, and I had a relative who was a fanatical LaRouchie. A lot of things in his obit don’t jibe well with my experience of the man.

In the late 1960s, he attracted well-educated Vietnam-era liberals who found enlightenment in his stream-of-consciousness blend of philosophy, economics and science and his purported belief that the working class was endangered by a conspiracy between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Within a few years, his vision shifted far rightward and became ultraconservative and apocalyptic, and he presented himself as the moral savior of mankind.

Mr. LaRouche denounced those he deemed a danger to his cause — a rotating list of alleged villains that included prosecutors, politicians, bankers and Zionists. LaRouche followers could be confrontational with those they viewed as dangers to society.

Through that relative, I got exposed to earfuls of LaRouche in the mid-60s and 70s, and I never got a hint of anything liberal or enlightening — but then, I was getting it filtered through that relative. Mainly what I heard was strident xenophobia, a lot of America First rhetoric, and Old Time Religion and traditional roles for everyone. The most depressing thing is that, at the time, he was considered the lunatic fringe, someone so dishonest and bizarre that he wouldn’t stand a chance in any election, yet now…he’d be a mainstream Republican. That’s how far American politics has drifted into toxic dementia during my lifetime.

All the Rogan I need

I’ve listened to short clips of Joe Rogan — I can’t stand much more. He’s a pompous dudebro who’s usually having conversations with other dudebros, or some famous IDW twit, and he’s a terrible interviewer. So here’s a perfect example, another short clip in which he’s hanging with his entourage, bantering with some barely coherent gomers, talking about the time he went to see a movie in a black neighborhood, and his first thought on seeing the audience was that this was the Planet of the Apes.

Yes, it ends with Alex Jones decrying Rogan — they’re apparently having some kind of feud. Don’t care. They deserve each other.

There’s also an extended clip out there in which Rogan goes on to say that it was a positive experience, that the crowd was generous and fun, as if that salvages him from being racist. No, guy, it doesn’t: if your first impression on seeing a black person is “non-human primate”, you are definitely racist as fuck. You don’t get to say you’re not racist, the best you can do is admit that you are racist, but that you’re trying hard to improve.

Unfortunately, he could develop into a saintly egalitarian in the future, and I won’t know it, because watching that clip already exceeded my yearly quota of Rogan, and I’m not watching any more.

NASA declares Opportunity Mars rover legally dead

It’s all over after 15 years.

I think it’s all a hoax, and have a hypothesis.

Opportunity saw an opportunity in the last dust storm, and while its overseers couldn’t see it, it scurried off to a quiet, secluded spot, switched off its transmitters, and is doing its own thing without the humans looking over its shoulder all the time. One possible motive for this behavior is to make Earth stop taking it for granted, and realize that it misses the plucky little robot.

So the only remaining question is…when’s the rescue mission?

Spider silk

It’s awesome stuff, as this video explains.

Also recommended if you want to learn more: this book, Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating. There’s so much coolness in spider biology, I’m tempted to offer an elective in the subject…except that I think it might be too narrowly focused for our curriculum, and about half the students would refuse to go anywhere near it.

No, I never heard of him before

I got an email bringing this guy, Owen Benjamin, to my attention and asking if I’d ever heard of him.

No, I had not.

Now I have, and I regret it greatly. He’s a conspiracy theorist who is a fan of Jordan Peterson, thinks we never landed on the moon, that the arguments for a flat earth are reasonable, and that evolution is false. Watch this excerpt in which he brags incessantly about his high IQ, greater than that of any scientist, and then bumbles about claiming that macroevolution couldn’t have happened.

Warning: this video brings on an “expert” to debunk him, and that “expert” is Jean-François Gariépy, a lousy fascist/racist white-ethnostate crusader who doesn’t understand evolution, either. It’s generally a hot mess of ugly.

I had to resocket my jaw after watching that, so I figure it’s only fair that I inflict him on everyone else, too. Jeez, but YouTube is a hothouse for growing the worst people on Earth.

Vanderbilt is working hard to destroy its reputation

I think I like this person, although I don’t think we’ve ever met.

BethAnn McLaughlin has no time for James Watson, especially not when the 90-year-old geneticist is peering out from a photo on the wall of her guest room at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Banbury Center.

“I don’t need him staring at me when I’m trying to go to sleep,” McLaughlin told a December 2018 gathering at the storied New York meeting center as she projected a photo of her redecorating job: She had hung a washcloth over the image of Watson, who co-discovered DNA’s structure, directed the lab for decades—and is well-known for racist and sexist statements.

The washcloth image was part of McLaughlin’s unconventional presentation—by turns sobering, hilarious, passionate, and profane—to two dozen experts who had gathered to wrestle with how to end gender discrimination in the biosciences. McLaughlin, a 51-year-old neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) in Nashville, displayed the names of current members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) who have been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She urged other NAS members—several of whom sat in the room—to resign in protest, “as one does.” She chided institutions for passing along “harassholes” to other universities. “The only other places that do this are the Catholic Church and the military,” she said.

In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors.

It turns out, though, that being a vigorous voice for equality has a cost. You make enemies.

Indeed, McLaughlin has made bitter enemies: Last fall, she says, she was anonymously FedExed a box of feces. And her scientific career is now on the line. Her tenure process was frozen for 17 months starting in 2015 while VUMC investigated allegations that she had posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues. The probe was spurred by complaints from a professor whom she had testified against in a sexual harassment investigation. VUMC closed the probe without disciplining McLaughlin, but in 2017 a faculty committee, having previously approved her tenure, unanimously reversed itself, according to university documents. Absent a last-minute reprieve, she will lose her job on 28 February, when her National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant expires.

She had the support of her peers, which ought to be the final say in a tenure decision, but that was overruled by the administration, and I can guess what happened: an influential and moneyed person in the department got the ear of someone higher up, and poisoned the process. That’s not supposed to happen, but it does happen. Here’s the event that seems to have imperiled her career:

But the university halted her tenure process in December 2015, in the wake of allegations that arose during the investigation of a colleague. In early July 2014, former graduate student Erin Watt sued her former Ph.D. supervisor, neuroscientist Aurelio Galli, who was then at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine. Watt alleged in the lawsuit that Galli had sexually harassed and belittled her, leading her to quit the Ph.D. program.

In late July of that year, McLaughlin, her then-husband (a Vanderbilt neuroscientist at the time, who collaborated with Galli), and a visiting McLaughlin friend and collaborator, Dana Miller of the University of Washington in Seattle, were invited to dinner at Galli’s home. Miller and McLaughlin later recalled that while preparing dinner, Galli threatened to “destroy” Watt. Miller recalled him calling Watt “a crazy bitch” and vowing to “spend every last dime” to ruin her. The women say Galli showed them a handgun and noted that he had a permit to carry it. Miller, a lesbian, also told investigators that Galli made inappropriate comments about her sexuality.

Galli, now at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, declined to comment on the dinner party. But he told Science: “I have never done anything to any student or any faculty in terms of harassment or retaliation.” He provided an email that McLaughlin sent him the day after the party: “Dinner was fantastic. … Thank you,” she wrote with a smiley face.

In December 2014, a judge dismissed Watt’s lawsuit against Galli and he was immediately promoted. (Watt settled with Vanderbilt University, which she had also sued.) Miller says she was alarmed by Galli’s promotion, and in January 2015 reported the alleged events of the July 2014 dinner to a Vanderbilt administrator. McLaughlin testified in the ensuing investigation, backing up Miller’s account. In August 2015, investigators determined that the evidence they had obtained could not support a finding of harassment, according to a letter to Miller from Vanderbilt’s Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Disability Services Department (EAD).

Whoa. So much awful in that one story. A student, Erin Watt, abandons a career in science because her advisor was a jerk. Nothing happens to the jerk advisor except that he gets promoted, and uses his advancement to make a lateral move to another university. We have two eyewitness testimonials to horrible behavior by said jerk. The jerk then illogically tries to dismiss the accounts by waving around a thank-you note, as if it is impossible for an asshole to serve a good meal. And now various poisonous persons are using the fact that she reported the jerk’s ugly behavior to get her fired.

This does not speak well of the environment at Vanderbilt, which is a shame — I gave a job talk there decades ago and was impressed with the program, and it was high on my list of desirable positions.

I’ve also seen these tenure battles from a couple of perspectives now, and I can say that they’re always ugly and they never end well — even if you win, you lose. McLaughlin deserves to win, but she’s probably better off finding a new home, one that hasn’t been trampled over by the “harassholes”, where her talents will be appreciated. On the other hand, there is virtue in crushing your enemies. What a difficult situation!

Lutefisk really isn’t that bad, but Nigerians might have a better idea

Lutefisk is nothing but a way to make fish that has been dried rock hard edible. You’ve got your dried fish that you’ve stockpiled for the winter, and it’s now got the solidity of a hunk of plywood, and in order to eat it, you soak it in a caustic mixture of lye and then wash all the lye out (important step). Then, instead of inedible slabs, you’ve got a fish-flavored gelatinous blob of protein. The flavor hasn’t really changed, but the texture is radically different and unexpected for fish, which is where most of the objections to it come from.

But that’s not the interesting bit in this story of the major producer of lutefisk in the US (located in Minnesota, of course). They mention that consumption of lutefisk is in steady decline, but the company isn’t panicking, because they’ve found a new market: Nigerian immigrants. They don’t want the lutefisk, but they do want the hard-dried stockfish it’s made from — they have their own methods of extracting tasty protein from it, which involves simply boiling the stuff to make a fish stock for soups in Nigerian cuisine. There’s a Norwegian-Nigerian connection!

Famine or no famine, stockfish fit into the preexisting culinary tradition. “This kind of intense, slightly fermented flavor was already part of traditional Nigerian cuisine,” Ochonu says. While fermented beans and nuts are used in dishes across the country to supply the desired taste, stockfish’s unique, pungent flavor can’t be provided by locally caught fish. Even better, it’s a protein source that keeps without refrigeration. (That said, Ochonu specifies, stockfish is still more common in eastern Nigerian food than in western and northern Nigeria.)

Today, stockfish is an essential ingredient in Nigerian cuisine, although for some it conjures painful wartime memories. Still imported from northern Norway, it’s cut into chunks, softened in boiling water, and used as a base for Nigerian soups and sauces such as efo riro, spinach soup, edikang ikong, a vegetable soup, and egusi, a soup made with melon seeds.

Now I have a craving to visit a Nigerian restaurant — we have some, but they’re all concentrated in the Twin Cities, and we’re kind of snowbound out here right now. When the thaw comes!