Maybe the conspiracy theorists need to conspire together more?

Would you believe that there are Sandy Hook truthers, people who believe the murders at the Newtown schools were completely faked? Some of them are even college professors! They think it was a cunning plan by Obama to railroad through gun control.

On the other hand, there are conspiracy theorists who have a completely different idea.

My worst fear: Dozens of terrorist sleeper cells, with five or six men each, would activate roughly at the same time and attack designated schools across the country. I’d be at work, and I would be helpless to retrieve my children and keep them safe from maniacs.

I imagined further that, from a terrorist’s point of view, these attacks would have a dramatic, profound effect on our collective psyche: No parent would allow his child to return to school to long as they were not secure from violent, lethal attacks. Our economy and economic security wouldn’t just hiccup; it would collapse.

I have a request. Can we please give them all the guns they so deeply desire, lock them in a room together, and let them…settle…the issue?

What was that about his Catholicism again?

William Oddie, the Catholic writer for the Catholic Herald who writes about Catholic concerns, is very irate. It seems a popular celebrity recently died, and the newspapers were fulsome in their obituaries, praising his charitable works and his lifelong generosity, but almost none of them mentioned that he was a devout Catholic who attended Mass several times a week, and that he even had a papal knighthood.

But why not mention that an important part of his life was attending daily Mass? There’s a deep dedication in the life of a man who gives away 90 per cent of everything he earns and so tirelessly does all the other things he did. You’d think that an obituarist would want to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though they couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human goodness.

There must be an anti-Catholic conspiracy in the media!

Unfortunately, the celebrity was Jimmy Savile, the fellow who was revealed to have been raping children for decades, “one of the most prolific sex offenders” in Britain.

I have to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though Oddie couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human evil.

And say, doesn’t the careful omission of his religious background therefore represent a pro-Catholic bias in the media?

The death of Aaron Swartz

Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn’t know much about him, but now I’ve learned two things.

One, he was a victim of depression. I’ve never experienced this personally — at worst I can say I’ve been sad and stressed at time — but let’s be clear about something: depression is something altogether different. Swartz wrote about his depression, and got across a little bit about what it actually feels like. This is good communication.

Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak – the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none.

Two, I’m outraged at the criminal abuse by the justice system that exacerbated his problems. The man was hounded to death, threatened with long prison terms by MIT and JSTOR, the journal archive service.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

You might be wondering what awful crime he committed that justified arresting him and confronting him with a 50 year prison sentence: he downloaded scientific research articles and then made them available to others (Wait…apparently, he didn’t even share them, but just downloaded them via MIT’s protocols). Uh-oh. I’ve done this…just not on the scale of Swartz’s efforts. Swartz was committed to Open Access.

This is the problem: not that Swartz opened the door to scientific research, but that we’re laboring under an antiquated system of scientific information storage that privileges profit-making over open access to the results of publicly-funded research.

Did you have to remind me?

I wake up this morning to discover Doonesbury telling me stuff I already know.

newsem

Yep, classes start for me tomorrow at 8am. I have a lighter load than the grueling mess last semester, and I also get to teach my fave class, developmental biology. No new paradigms this time, though — I think it worked fairly well the way I did it last time, with a mix of once weekly lectures and lots of class time dedicated to discussion and analysis. I’ll also be compelling my students to set up blogs and write about science publicly, so I’ll occasionally be linking to a lot of student work.

One thing I’m considering doing differently…I might post summaries of lectures and discussion topics here, if time allows. Public exposure of all the stuff that usually goes on behind the doors of the classroom? I don’t know if the world is ready for that.

I’m including the syllabus for my developmental biology course. Just in case you think I’m totally slacking with just one class, I’m also teaching a course called Biological Communications, a writing course that tries to get students to read and write in the style of the scientific literature, and am also doing individual studies with 5 students.

Dating tips!

Rats, it’s too late. If only the girls had studied these dating tips back in the day, I might not have grown into the sullen, resentful, entitled git illustrated here.

dancing

driving

And my favorite…

deserve

There’s the root of the whole problem! Men deserve your complete and total attention at all times!

While we’re on the subject of how the wimminz ought to behave, I should mention the F00t’s new video, titled, “Do Hot Girls Have All the Advantages?” Yep, it’s about how women have an edge by just being pretty.

Let that sink in for a bit.

Oh, I wish I were pretty! Then there’s an interesting reply: Why Can’t Thunderf00t Be More Like Indiana Jones? Isn’t it interesting how we can overlook superficial attributes in a man, but they’re always prioritized in women? And how some people can look on this skewed perspective as advantageous for women?

Although, I have to say, I don’t expect the guy to look like Indiana Jones, but am just dismayed at how he’s looking more and more like Pat Robertson every day. Robertson recently fielded a question from a young viewer about how he was troubled that his father seemed to be growing more distant from his mother; his answer was basically that his mother just wasn’t pretty enough, which was why all the romance is leaving the marriage.

One more: misandric pants.

I shoulda checked the reviews first

I watched the movie Red Lights last night on Netflix. The first part of the movie was strikingly familiar: it practically stole the life story of James Randi. There was the Peter Popoff exposé, the psychic surgery stunts, the usual whirl of frauds and fanatics, all under different names with different details, but the same general stories about exposing flim-flam. And then it had a marvelous cast: Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy. The whole movie is following a good ol’ skeptical trajectory…and then, the ending. Oh, jebus, I have never seen a movie so thoroughly implode as this one did with that ending.

Stop here. Don’t read further, unless you want to know how it ends, because I’m going to give it all away. Completely. This isn’t just a spoiler, it is full disclosure.

[Read more…]

Confusing cause

A via thousand priests are worried that same-sex marriage will lead to Catholics being jailed and killed for their faith.

More than 1,000 priests have signed a letter voicing concerns that same-sex marriage will threaten religious freedoms in a way that was last seen during centuries of persecution of Catholics in England.

In the letter published in the Daily Telegraph, the priests claim that same-sex marriage could even lead to Catholics being excluded from some professions, such as teaching.

No, no, no. First, get down off that cross; there will be no executions, banishments, and imprisonments for Catholicism as there were during those ugly years of the Reformation. Also, while I wouldn’t be surprised if some people lost their jobs (like some fanatical pharmacists and teachers), it won’t be for being Catholic. It will be for being raging bigoted asshats.

Unless you want to argue that bigotry is a cherished sacrament in Catholicism. Well, then, I guess maybe you will find your religion treated with contempt.

This drone technology is getting really annoying

You know how it is. You’re getting down with your mate, all absorbed in the intimacies, and then one of those damned drones comes whispering up outta nowhere and aims a camera at your triple-X action. And the lights! It was all dark and cozy, but no, they gotta come in with all lights blazing, illuminating every mottle and dimple.

That’s what NOAA did to these poor Pholidoteuthis adami, catching them doing the deed.

I will say this for the squid: they know what’s important. They didn’t even flinch, but just kept at it. And look at them! They’re head to tail, and the male is doing it all upside down! I’m impressed. And inspired.