Go away, Jenny McCarthy

McCarthy is still around, and she has just issued a “call to action” — the anti-vaxxers are supposed to rush out and promote a book by JB Handley.

Yeah, JB Handley. Anti-vax, autism-obsessed crank. I think both of them can crawl back into the hole they crawled out of.

This JB Handley:

How did your life change when you discovered your son had autism?

Everything changed from the day it happened. It was an immediate nightmare. It was 30 days of six, seven, eight hours of nonstop crying by both me and my wife. It was the painful realization that my son may not have the kind of life that I expected for him. And once the grief had passed just enough to get up off the floor, it was a mandate to do whatever I could do with the rest of my life to give him the best possible life.

There’s a kind of annoying selfishness there. Guess what? Your children generally will not have the life you plan for them. Learn to appreciate them for who they are.

They just cried non-stop for a month? Over-react much? It’s like hearing that someone melted down when they discovered their child had a birthmark. Calm down. There are degrees of autism, and none of them are a death sentence.

Even more bizarre, he then declares that his son is now “recovering dramatically, getting all his words back, going to a normal school”. Maybe the diagnosis didn’t warrant a month of bawling? Autistic children are children — they grow and change. Freaking out over autism is just silly.

So this is the guy who has a new book. I don’t care, and am not interested. This is the guy who has Jenny McCarthy excited — I am unimpressed with the endorsement.

There is a convention for citing a tweet in an academic paper?

I guess there is now.

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet.

Setting aside the whole issue of why you would want to cite a tweet, this is not a well thought-out format. It assumes way too much: it ignores other potential microblogging media, like Mastodon, and assumes that there is only one such service, Twitter, and that the username is sufficient to identify the source. As the article I lined to mentions, there ought to at least be a URL associated with the citation — otherwise, you have to go to the service and search to find that specific set of words. And Twitter search is terrible.

Oh, well, there’s an easy way around this limitation: don’t dignify Twitter with formal citations.

Dam every river! Chop down every tree!

Our President* is now claiming that allowing rivers to flow into the ocean is bad, and that we could stop wildfires but clear-cutting everything.

We could probably end all the fires if we paved over the entirety of California.

We really need to elect a swarm of Democrats in the midterms so we can end this misery.

There shall be modesty!

We’re prepping the house today because we have some installers coming by to finally put up blinds on our windows. They’re doing 8 rooms: my office, the sun porch, the kitchen, 3 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms. We’ve been getting by with nothing for a couple of months, and it’s been very annoying. Today, the cat gets to be annoyed at all the strange people tromping through her domain.

You realize what this means, right? All you peeping toms have missed the golden opportunity to spy on me in dishabille, and that window is closing today.

Will we really miss Alex Jones?

No.

Here’s a mind-blowing compilation of his conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately, what worries me most isn’t that this guy raves online all the time, and has some incredibly stupid ideas…but that there are people who believe him. They don’t disappear when Jones is banned from YouTube.

And you do realize there is now a large idiocy vacuum on YouTube that people will rush to fill?

If you like Tommy Robinson, you will love Donald Trump (and vice-versa)

Watch these cackling nitwits trash a bookstore.

The weird thing is, this bookstore is in London, and they’re chanting Trump! Trump! Trump!

The organizer of this intrusion, Luke Nash-Jones, had a plan: act normal and ask them for a couple of awkward books. I guess that’s what passes for normal among a crowd of ninnies, or as they call themselves, Anglo Celtic traditionalists. As for the awkward books…

He exclaimed oh my god as he shows the camera a copy of “The Jewish Question”, by Abram Leon.

He accused the shopworker of being a Jew hater, despite his attempts to explain the book was a posthumously published study of the historic roots of anti-Semitism written by a man who died in a concentration camp.

The lesson I’ve learned is that ignorant, hateful people all around the world look up to Donald Trump as their hero. He truly is an international man of our times.

How the rich virtue signal

Many people in Minnesota (not including me) have lake cabins — lots of lakes, lots of waterfront property, lots of opportunity for a getaway on the lake. Most of them are cozy, rustic places with basic amenities and big windows looking out on the water, because that’s mainly what you’re there for. For a few weeks every summer, and maybe a few weekends here and there, you go fishing, you waterski, you have a few barbecues. At least that’s what I picture.

There aren’t very many summer mansions around. I can’t even imagine owning a gigantic house that you only visit for vacations. But now I can picture one, because Betsy DeVos has one in Michigan, and it just got the McMansion Hell treatment.

I guess it might count as cozy to some people, since it only has 3 bedrooms…and “10 bathrooms, three kitchens, eight dishwashers, 13 porches, and an elevator”. I guess that sprawling pile is just intended for entertaining, or perhaps just flaunting ostentatious display because you have nothing better to do with your wealth than to instill envy in your equally tasteless friends with more money than they deserve.

Architecture is never a vacuum. This house sucks, but like all buildings, it is a reflection of both the people and the broader culture that make building it both possible and desirable. Those, too, irrefutably suck.

Physicists may have the name game down cold, but they’re weird

I’d love to know what this dark matter stuff is, and you know that physicists want to know even more.

So, why does dark matter, matter, anyway? Well, this stuff makes up a huge chunk of the Universe, and we want to know what the Universe is made of. If it turns out to be an elementary particle that isn’t part of the Standard Model of particle physics, then that means the Standard Model is wrong, and we’ve got some cool new physics! If, on the other hand, it somehow turns out to be that our understanding of gravity is fundamentally flawed, we still get new physics. And new physics is always exciting! Either way, it’s about learning about our Universe. Think about it: right now, the stuff we know and are familiar with accounts for just 5% of the Universe’s contents. Imagine what ticking off another 25% of the Universe would mean. Don’t know? Neither do I, but that’s what’s so exciting about it! My bet is that it’s a new particle, and the Standard Model is wrong. Maybe it’ll be SIDM, maybe WIMPs, or Kaluza-Klein dark matter. Maybe it’ll be several types of dark matter, with new forces in the dark sector; I mean, why shouldn’t it be, when the visible sector is a particle zoo? Whatever it turns out to be, unraveling this mystery will be a ground-smashing achievement in the world of physics.

That comes from a pretty good summary of many of the current models for dark matter (well, I thought it was an informative summary, but I’m a biologist, so what do I know?). Some day I’m going to need a physicist to sit down with me over a beer and explain this stuff in little words.

Tech companies are not altruistic

If Steve Jobs was an awful person, why should we expect that the Apple corporation is altruistic and good? The news is full of this shocking announcement that Apple has removed all of Alex Jones’ podcasts from the iTunes library.

In a statement Sunday evening to BuzzFeed News, Apple confirmed that it notified Jones of the decision to remove the five shows under its hate speech guidelines earlier this weekend. “Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users,” a company spokesperson said. “Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

The cynic in me is wondering why. It’s a no-brainer to me that people shouldn’t promote hateful lunacy like Jones’ ranting, but Apple was just fine with it for years when Jones and his crew were spouting deranged shit non-stop. I don’t believe that a corporation has suddenly grown a conscience, so there must be something more to it.

Again, cynical me speaks up and suggests that the haters, while a profitable market to cater to, have gotten out of hand and are alienating the non-haters, another profitable market. Apple is cracking down on the most prominent crackpot on their network to put on a show of “Hey, we’re good guys at heart”, while allowing the numerous littler Nazis to thrive.

…unless you think those vague guidelines are going to be enforced all across the board. I think not. Making an example of one particularly loud asshole will send a useful message to the less successful assholes that they’d better be careful not to disrupt the business, which is Apple’s only goal.