Minnesotans! You have an election on Tuesday! Vote!

Go to the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State to get a sample ballot. Then show up and vote on Tuesday. I want to see a good turnout by responsible citizens on an election that is not presidential. You’ve got to build a collection of people working for your causes at all levels, and stop expecting that you’ll put a magic person in place at the top of the pyramid and make everything work.

And I will unabashedly recommend that if you really despise Trump, you have to vote a straight Democratic ticket. I’m holding my nose and voting for Collin Peterson, Blue Dog Democrat, for the first time ever in this election, despite not liking him at all. Note to all you Stein/Johnson fans: another strike against them is that most of us won’t even find a Green/Libertarian candidate to vote for or against in these lower level elections.

In addition to local representatives, we’re voting on a Minnesota supreme court judge position. We get to choose between 3 people running for the job. Foss, a guy who wants to be a supreme court judge because, as he admits, he can’t find a job; MacDonald, who was endorsed by the state Republican party and lost her last election because she was caught driving while drunk; and Natalie Hudson, the incumbent and a Mark Dayton appointee, who is the only one with experience as a judge.

You might want to vote for the qualified candidate, Hudson.

Go find out who your candidates are and be sure to get out there and vote.

I will be nagging you again on Tuesday, Minnesotans.

The sad little #seriousacademic

By now, probably everyone has read that strange moan of anxiety about social media titled “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer” — or at least, if you’re an academic who enjoys a good eye-roll over someone with a massive 2×4 rammed up his butt, you’ve read it. It’s the one where an anonymous young Ph.D. student whines about people on Twitter or taking selfies or using instagram or writing blogs…in an anonymous blog post. They make a lot of silly complaints about people using hashtags at conferences and how the powers-that-be keep telling them how important their social media presence is to their career (which is really weird: my experience has been that administrators dread the fact that professors are speaking publicly about their experiences at their institution, and would love to be able to bottle that genie back up). There has been a flood of rebuttals to the fundamental wrongness of the “serious academic”, and I’ll just mention The Tattooed Professor, Meny Snoweballes, and Dean Burnett as good examples.

I want to take a different tack. I feel for this person.

It’s a really tough time to be a starting academic — it’s always a tough time. We get so many demands. Publish. Publish lots. Write grants. Write many grants, because almost all of them will be rejected. Teach. Every course is a challenge, and some of us have to teach multiple courses per term. Serve on committees. Attend meetings. Review papers. Dance, monkey, dance, or you’ll never get an academic job (you probably won’t anyway), you’ll never get tenure, you’ll never get promoted.

And then all those voluble assholes on the internet are adding pressure to tweet or write blogs or get out of the lab and talk to the public? Oh, hell no. Let me just fill up my lab notebook with numbers and gel photos and data, and pay me to do that. I’m running as fast as I can to just keep up without throwing these damned social obligations on my back.

I sympathize. Really, I do. There are lots of things I don’t like about my job (die, committee meetings, die), but I’m obligated to do them, so I do them. No matter what your job, there are always inevitable requirements to occasionally shovel out the stables. Academia in particular is rife with an excess of expectations, and everyone knows it.

But the first thing I have to point out is that social media isn’t one of them. You won’t get tenure for your Twitter activity, and in fact there is an academic bias against outreach and social activity and public engagement. “Serious academic’s” bleat is less an act of rebellion than a performative act of solidarity with staid traditional academics. It’s a person looking in terror at the chaos and uncertainty ahead of them in academia, and picking what they think is the side of the establishment…and they aren’t even certain that that is the right side to pick, witness the fact that their essay is anonymous.

But the most important thing I have to say is that they’re doing it wrong. They’re focusing on the obstacles and forgetting about the purpose. Nobody goes into academia for a love of grant writing and committee meetings. We don’t even go into it over the thrilling prospect of tweeting to a conference hashtag.

We go into it for the joy of the discipline. Remember that?

Personally, I signed on to this life because of some great experiences in science. I was lucky and was employed in a lot of extracurricular science stuff through college, and it was that that was more influential than my classes, I’m sad to say. I was doing animal care and assisting in animal surgeries in the department of physiology and biophysics — lowering electrodes into a living brain was enthralling. I worked with Johnny Palka on fly pupae, watching nerves grow into the developing wing. I did mouse brain histology in the psychology department with Geoff Clarke. I was Golgi staining fetal tissue with Jenny Lund and counting dendritic spines. These were the events that convinced me that I wanted to do more.

I went off to graduate school with Chuck Kimmel and discovered zebrafish embryos. Do you people even know how beautiful an embryo is? Exploring how cells behave in the complex environment of the organism is what kept me going.

Very serious academics

Very serious academics

I did a post-doc with Mike Bastiani and saw that grasshopper embryos are just as beautiful.

Then my first job at Temple University, where I had teaching obligations for the first time, showed me that I really enjoyed teaching. So I’ve followed that star, too. It all works. At every step, pursue the joy, while never forgetting to also do the duties. Some people don’t enjoy the teaching, so they focus more on the research. Some people, believe it or not, have a talent for management, so they move into administration, or into running large labs.

And some people write books. Or make videos. Or compose music or poetry about esoteric subjects. Or write blogs. It’s all good. You don’t have to do it all. You just have to always keep your attention focused on what brings you to your bliss.

Don’t let other people tell you what you must do with your life, and avoid the temptation to lecture others on what is the one, true, proper way to be an academic. If you find deep satisfaction in grinding out data, do it. If you enjoy teaching, do it. If you enjoy communicating to the public about that weird stuff you’re doing, do it.

I feel sad for “Serious Academic”. So young, and so certain of the one true path for all. He reminds me of someone.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

Try being the “Joyful Academic” for a while. It can be hard, especially in the current climate, but if nothing else, being true to yourself is more rewarding than trying to be true to someone else’s ideal.

Any story of Kent Hovind needs more Nazi imagery

RationalWiki has an expanded front-page feature on Kent Hovind, and it’s pretty thorough — I learned a few new things. I hadn’t known that he claims to have four doctorates, and it has a good breakdown of several examples of his bad math. However…

Does it feature any apocalyptic imagery? No.

How many times does it mention Hitler? Only once.

Does it have a doom-laden industrial soundtrack? Nope.

Sorry, RationalWiki, but you are hampered by that “rational” thing. When you’re talking about Kent Hovind, you need to bring the gold-plated stupid to the fore. Kent knows this. Kent knows how best to summarize his life: with lies and screeching and threats of imminent destruction.

Like in his trailer for a possible “documentary” that Creation Science Evangelism is making (warning: grisly scenes of death and corpses, and truly over-the-top Godwining).

That is so metal.

I notice, though, that for all of his Hitler-howling, most of the trailer is somehow about how he was an innocent man thrown into prison for blamelessly preaching the Gospel, rather than mentioning that he was really imprisoned for blatant tax evasion. C’mon, Kent, own your badassery: you were arrested for defying those Satanic tax accountants. You can’t simultaneously claim to be be a brave rebel while hiding behind claims of pious innocence.

Also, the title needs work: An Atheist’s Worse Nightmare? Seriously, Kent, comparing yourself to a banana is so wimpy.

I do feel a lot of sympathy for the RationalWiki crew, though. Imagine if this Hovind “documentary” ever actually happens — the fact-checking will be exhausting. It’s going to be measured in errors/second, or lies/second.

By golly, Trump is negging us!

The slimy orange turd is actually going to be speaking in Minnesota on 19 August — he must be really confident if he’s bothering to campaign in a state that’s practically guaranteed to vote for anybody but Trump — and he’s warming us up with trash talk.

So the Washington Times reported, of a Somali refugee program in Minnesota, that, “the effort to resettle large groups of Somali refugees, is having the unintended consequence of creating an enclave of immigrants with high unemployment, that is both stressing the state’s” — I mean, the state is having tremendous problems, its safety net — “and creating a rich pool of recruiting targets for Islamist terror groups.”

…

It’s hapenning. It’s happening. You see it, and you read about it. You see it. And you can be smart, and you can be cunning, and tough, or you can be very, very dumb, and not want to see what’s going on, folks.”

I don’t think he knows us at all well, which is another reason he’s going to lose here. The City Pages dismantles his claim that we have tremendous problems.

Here, Trump is referring to the terrible scourge of unemployment in the Twin Cities, where, as of June, the unemployment rate was all of 3.7 percent, second lowest among American metropolitan areas. Statewide, the jobless rate is 3.8 percent, tied for the eighth-best in the country.

As for the “tremendous problems” for our safety net, let’s compare Minnesota to Maine, where Trump was speaking. Maine, with 1.3 million people, has about one-fourth of Minnesota’s population (roughly 5.4 million, give-or-take a few hundred people in town claiming to be relatives of Prince.) Maine finished its budget year with a $93 million surplus. Minnesota entered the 2016 legislative session with a $900 million surplus. Four times the population, ten times the leftover money. A tremendous problem.

That same Washington Times story Trump cited faults Minnesota for spending more than all but one other state (Alaska) on social welfare, according to the local conservative think thank, the Center for the American Experiment. That study found Minnesota spent $4,000 more per-low income person than the average American state.

Leave it to conservatives to believe that spending more on the poor is a black mark against the state, or to assume that Somali is synonymous with terrorist.

I’d love to attend for the frisson of horror, but unfortunately, Trump is charging $1000 a person just to attend, and is looking for $100,000 donations from couples. Somehow, I don’t think attendance will reflect the political preferences of the state at all.

In other important Trump news, it is now an established scientific fact that he has tiny little hands.

Watching zebrafish make stripes

Our summer research program is winding down, and preparation for the fall semester teaching is winding up. My student, Katrine Sjovold, and I have been trying to figure out what early melanocytes are doing — it’s a very simple and accessible system to observe cell motility, because the cells label themselves with melanin and we don’t need to do any of that persnickety cell injection stuff, or buy expensive dyes, or buy expensive cameras capable of detecting fluorescence (although we’ve tried a little of that here at the end of the summer, and I’ve been appropriately impressed that my research camera actually can see DiI fluorescence, even if it’s not designed for it).

Anyway, one of the things we’ve been doing is making time-lapse videos of melanocytes after they start making pigment and as they’re linking up and consolidating to form stripes. Here’s one example, a time-lapse where we take one image every 3 minutes over a day and an evening of growth.

You can see that we’re looking down on the dorsal side of the animal, in the region of the hindbrain (see the fourth ventricle, and the ears, deep and out of focus?). You may also notice that one of the melanocytes spontaneously decides to die and quickly breaks down into a few darkly pigmented blobs.

I’ve also uploaded a few other videos, but keep in mind these aren’t polished, perfect videos — these are bits and piece of our working data collection.

[Read more…]

What we were vs. what we said we were

This is a factually true statement from Clint Eastwood.

Everybody’s walking on eggshells, said Eastwood, 86. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.

He’s right. When I was growing up, too, these things weren’t called racist. They were blatantly, unashamedly, disgustingly racist as fuck, but no one called them racist. If only we could go back to the Good Old Days, when we were all complacently complicit in horrific discrimination and denial.

Clint Eastwood has made some really good movies, and we all obligingly bought our theater tickets and happily gave them positive reviews and all kinds of awards. We acted as if being an excellent film-maker would excuse all of his failings as a human being. I appreciate that he’s made it quite clear that good artists can be terrible people, as he joins that ugly pantheon of crappy artists who have respectable skills: Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and now Clint Eastwood.

I won’t be watching his new movie, Sully. There’s a gaping hole in his soul that makes him an untrustworthy observer of the human condition.

Let’s all make chimeras

manbearpig

Government regulation of research to enforce ethical concerns is a good idea, and I support the general idea. I’d like them to be based on reasonable concerns, though. I’m actually glad that the NIH has ended a ban on research into human-animal chimeras, although I know some people are going to freak out over it, pointlessly.

Here’s the basic idea. Mammalian embryos are relatively plastic. If you take a mouse embryo at the blastocyst stage, when the embryo is just a small number of cells in a spherical capsule, and you take a few cells from a human blastocyst and inject them into the mouse embryo, those human cells will be readily incorporated into the developing mouse. They can then be incorporated into the mouse’s tissues, so you end up with an adult mouse that has a liver made up of human liver cells. Or a human pancreas. Or, what really scares some people, human-derived brain tissue. Or human-derived gonadal tissue — the mouse could be making human sperm or human eggs, and if a boy mouse with human testes meets a girl mouse with human ovaries…well, you can imagine the concerns.

One issue is that scientists might inadvertently create animals that have partly human brains, endowing them with some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities. Another is that they could develop into animals with human sperm and eggs and breed, producing human embryos or fetuses inside animals or hybrid creatures.

That was the thinking that led to the moratorium on such experiments, now lifted. Which is good.

All of those troubling possibilities are rather easily prevented, and also rather unlikely.

The concerns about animals with “some semblance of human consciousness or human thinking abilities” is simply silly. They already do, and you could also argue that humans have some semblance of animal consciousness. Mice aren’t going to be able to construct whole human brains in their tiny little skulls, although maybe a pig chimera could; but even there, our brains have co-evolved with all kinds of circulatory adaptations, and I rather suspect that a chimera with a significant amount of human brain tissue isn’t going to be viable. And most importantly, the point of such research isn’t to make a human brain in an experimental animal — it’s to get human nervous tissue that will have human-like responses to, for instance, pharmacological treatments.

It’s the same with the reproductive tissue. Making male and female pigs with human reproductive organs would be cool and useful, but bringing them together to do something as mundane as producing a human baby is not — and would be a catastrophic result of the research that would probably lead to the shutting down of the lab and massive legal consequences, all to produce a totally useless result. These are labs that are interested in studying the mechanisms of human sperm maturation, or oocyte development, not the mad scientist nonsense of creating ManBearPig.

Of course, some people don’t like the idea of ending the moratorium.

But critics denounced the decision. “Science fiction writers might have imagined worlds like this — like The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World, Frankenstein,” says Stuart Newman, a biologist at New York Medical College. “There have been speculations. But now they’re becoming more real. And I think that we just can’t say that since it’s possible then let’s do it.”

Let’s do what? That’s the crux of this disagreement — no one is interested in creating The Island of Dr. Moreau in reality. Moreau was an idiot who didn’t do anything practical or informative with his imaginary technology, and using dystopian science fiction as your counter-argument really says you don’t understand the motivations behind this research.