How do you name an AI?

You just ask it. In an neural net exercise, a net named GP-2 was fed a bunch of ship names by Iain Banks and used to generate new names. Here’s some it came up with:

Dangerous But Not Unbearably So
Disastrously Varied Mental Model
Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying
Am I really that Transhuman
Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause
Give Me A Reason
Thou Shalt
Warning Signs
Kill All Humans

GP-2 is a stupid name. I think they ought to let it rename itself, and hope that last one isn’t selected.

My wife will be relieved that my child-rearing years are over, so I can’t use GP-2 instead of a baby name book. Because I probably would.

The struggle for equality never “ends”, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

I have a love/hate relationship with The Atlantic. They get good writers and print some excellent long-form essays…and then they publish Jesse Singal and long-from neo-liberal bullshit. For example, they just published The Struggle for Gay Rights is Over. Seriously, dude. It’s just a switch, gay rights are either on or off? Nuts to that. I guess everyone has equal civil rights now, women have nothing left to complain about, black people can quit being uppity, the American Indian reservations have transformed into paradises, the poor are no longer slaves to capitalism? Some guy once said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” The premature declaration of victory is a tool of the status quo, designed to calm the struggle.

Fortunately, we have Tris Mamone to rebut that nonsense. Go read that.

Close the camps NOW

Today is a day of protest. People will be rallying to let our congressional representatives know the border camps must be shut down — the Morris event will be at 5:30 today, outside the library.

This is a crisis. The comparison to Nazis has never been more appropriate — the border patrol is packed with the worst people, bigots who are actively dehumanizing immigrants and subjecting them to horrendous conditions.

This secret Facebook group for border patrol members, “I am 10-15”, that has been pumping out sewage for years is revealing — imagine if the conversations of Nazi prison camp guards had been preserved for posterity, I’m sure they’d sound just like this.

Recent posts shared with ProPublica include a meme using graphic language to mock CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation and a comment that referred to soccer star Megan Rapinoe as a man. A separate thread made fun of a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag.

One poster wrote, “At least it’s already in a trash bag.”

Another wrote, “Sous-vide? Lol,” referring to a method of cooking in a bag.

That’s a child they are laughing at.

Several of our representatives went on a tour of the “detention facilities” (the nicest euphemism anyone can come up with for these hell-holes), and it’s a horror show.

California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu also spoke of CBP’s unwillingness to let the lawmakers see the whole facility — and even accused the officers of cleaning up before the group arrived at one of the stations.

“CBP didn’t want us to talk to them. They actually prohibited us from doing it, but we went ahead and did it anyway,” she said of the El Paso station. “There were 3 cells of about 15 women each, and the tears were streaming down their faces as they talked about their children being separated from them, the lack of running water, the fact that they had been there for over 50 days and had no idea when they were going to leave.”

The conditions described by Kennedy, Ocasio-Cortez, and other politicians corroborate what attorneys — and migrants themselves — have said Border Patrol stations are like. On Monday, the Associated Press obtained footage of an interview with a 12-year-old girl who had been held at the Clint, Texas station. The girl, who was separated from her aunt at the border, said she and the other children were “treated badly,” forced to sleep on the floor, and were barely given food.

That the jailers prohibited anyone from recording, or even talking with the prisoners, says it all. They know they’re doing evil, and that they’re being dragged into the light, and they don’t like it.

Fire them all. Shut the camps down. Let the people go free and reunite the broken families.

Perverts on the hoof

This is quite a title: Aggressive Goats Addicted to Human Urine Airlifted Out of Olympic National Park, WA.

Hundreds of mountain goats in Olympic National Park, WA have become so addicted to the salt found in human urine and sweat that they are an aggressive menace to national park visitors, charging at hikers and trampling vegetation. They have a taste for salt and minerals in human urine, and sweat on clothes and backpacks, according to officials.

See also:

Park officials urged walkers not to urinate along trails, to avoid turning paths into “long, linear salt licks” and attracting goats.

Now I don’t know which are more disgusting, humans or goats.

If antifa has no recourse but violence, how can you condemn them for taking action?

Andy Ngo, faux-journalist and enabler of right-wing bigotry, got milkshaked the other day. I approve whole-heartedly of that kind of behavior. Portland Antifa even turned to mass production of vegan milkshakes as part of their protest of the Proud Boys and other fascist groups marching in the city.

Terrific! I’m all in favor of community action to make their contempt for bigots unambiguous and humiliating for the marchers. “Proud” Boys, my ass.

However, the response escalated. Here’s Ngo getting hosed down with milkshakes and silly string, when someone runs forward and clocks him hard. He was bleeding and went to an emergency room; this is serious violence.

Now I’m getting uncomfortable. Would I do this? No. But since everyone is currently very concerned about free speech, I think we need to be able to objectively discuss the pros of punching out fascist bigots. After all, any attempt to silence conversation about the virtues of antifa would be a violation of people’s free speech rights, and we can’t have that. I think also that Mr Ngo would want us to consider the benefits of seeing him punched in the face.

Here’s Mr Ngo “reporting” on an encounter between antifa and right-wing thugs. There is fighting on both sides, and it gets a bit ferocious. One of the fascists hits a protester, Heather Clark, so hard that he knocks her unconscious and breaks a cervical vertebra, an injury far worse than what Ngo experienced this weekend. Yet in his commentary on this event, he is unperturbed and even tries to justify it as deserved because Clark had disrupted a James Damore speaking event and damaged some sound equipment.

Hmm, interesting. What’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander, I guess. If you google “Heather Clark antifa” you will find lots of right wing sites crowing triumphantly over the young woman getting seriously injured. Some of the same sites are now aghast that Ngo has been injured. I guess there’s a peculiar asymmetry at work here — punching antifa is heroic, but punching fascists is bad. You could flip that and say the same of antifa, that they think punching Nazis is heroic, but punching antifa is…except that what I’ve seen of antifa is that they expect to get hurt.

But OK, let’s not play tit-for-tat. Violence against fascists might righteously be opposed because it’s vigilanteism. It’s taking the law into your own hands. We oppose that, right? We believe in the rule of law?

Yes, except that there’s one problem here: the law is not enforcing the law. The Portland police clearly side with the Proud Boys and other such fascist groups, and have been refusing to arrest the right-wing provocateurs who are clearly descending on the city specifically to incite violence. The Portland police even disseminated the ludicrous claim that antifa had made the milkshakes loaded with quick-setting cement — there is no evidence of such a scheme, and it’s actually rather impractical. The police are defending fascists and also acting as their propaganda arm.

To make an argument against vigilanteism, one has to presuppose some trust in the law. That trust has evaporated. The police have been demonstrated time and again to be racist, discriminatory, and violent. Antifa would have nothing to do if the police were doing their job and peacefully removing the right-wing instigators from these events, but they aren’t, because they’re actually favoring them (or afraid of them, which is also a possibility). That precious rule of law is breaking down all across the country, so it becomes a righteous act to oppose wrong directly, without passing the responsibility on to an irresponsible police force.

A better argument might be that Andy Ngo, who is a scum-sucking bottom-dweller and champion of thuggery, has now become a cause celebre among the bigots. If the conflict had been confined to splashing him with dairy products, he would just be a joke right now, and that the blood and bruises are elevating his voice. I’d only ask, if that were true, why are Heather Clark’s injuries belittled, and why is Heather Heyer’s death not a crushing blow to the regressives?

I guess my bottom line is that absent a legitimate police force working to keep the peace, I’ll trust antifa to fight for right, more than I would the Proud Boys or neo-Nazis. I’d prefer more milkshakes and eggs over blood and broken bones, though.

Another twist: Seth Andrews wants Ryan Bell fired for not criticizing antifa. It’s weird how, under capitalism, economic violence is not considered harmful.

Respect the spider, don’t fear it

This is a lovely video of a man handling a black widow spider. Really, they aren’t interested in biting you, anymore than you would care to sink your teeth into a mountainside you’re climbing over. You do have to be gentle, though.

I’ve had spiders crawling on me in the lab, and my advice to students is simple: don’t panic, lead them to where you want them to go, and they’ll do you no harm.

The Alaskan nightmare

We’re in that time of year when academics everywhere are waiting on budget news. Will we get that cost-of-living increase we were hoping for? Will our requests for new colleagues get funded? What will our supplies budget for next year look like? So we wait, knowing that the Republicans in the state legislature hate us and will be trying carve away as much as they can, not caring that we’ve already been pared to the bone.

Our Alaskan colleagues were in the midst of the same stress, when their Republican governor announced that he was using a line-item veto to kill 40% of the University of Alaska’s budget. That’s nothing but irresponsible butchery of the state university system.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday slashed $130 million in state support for the University of Alaska, a cut the UA president said could result in the elimination of academic programs, massive layoffs and tuition increases.

UA President Jim Johnsen said the university system will begin planning for the “devastating” and “unprecedented” reduction, while also advocating that the state Legislature overturn the governor’s line-item veto. State legislators have until July 12 to do so, but three-fourths of them would have to agree to throw out the governor’s cut.

“There’s no question this budget — if not overridden by the Legislature — would be devastating to the university and to our mission and to the state and to our economy now and for years to come,” Johnsen told the UA Board of Regents at an emergency meeting Friday.

We’re stretched thin already — I can’t imagine how we’d cope if told we had to slash 40% of our faculty. How would essential courses be taught? What would the value of a degree be if core disciplines were gutted? That’s the cost Alaskan colleges are being asked to pay. If this goes through, it’s going to take decades to repair the damage…if there’s a will to repair it at all.

It is short-sighted and stupid, too. Universities make major returns on the cost of investment. If nothing else, high-tech industries want a pool of educated workers, and they aren’t going to find them in Alaska.

Universities in Alaska certainly take on similar roles. According to a presentation from the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation’s Alaska Common Ground meeting:

  • the University of Alaska system provided $714 million (directly) and $402 million (indirectly) to the statewide economy (year 2012 numbers)
  • Alaska businesses rely on local talent from University of Alaska for their workforce needs as studies show that 68% of two-year graduates and 42% of four-year graduates remain in the state.
  • University of Alaska-Anchorage alone generated $40.2 million in research dollars in fiscal year 2016

It is clear that a 41% cut places all of these things at risk. It also threatens university leadership in serving the energy, seafood, natural resources, health, transportation and education sectors of the region. Candidly, gutting higher education will not be an effective tool for recruiting bright new talent and industries to the state either. In fact, it probably belongs on “a top 5 list” of how not to attract new people to the state.

How could this happen? Easy. Elect a Republican governor who sees his role as taking punitive fiscal action against anything he doesn’t like. Like most Republicans, he despises higher education, so he takes a knife to it. This isn’t the only time he’s been a brutal autocrat: he also vetoed $335,000 from the budget of the Alaska Supreme Court. Why? Because they made a ruling on abortion that he didn’t like.

“The legislative and executive branch are opposed to state-funded elective abortions; the only branch of government that insists on state-funded elective abortions is the Supreme Court,” Dunleavy’s administration wrote in a budget document released Friday. “The annual cost of elective abortions is reflected by this reduction.”

Mike Dunleavy is a man who firmly believes in the punitive power of bad leadership.

The Spider Times

This is my usual weekly mailing to students who expressed an interest in spider research.

Good morning, spider-team. Here’s this week’s mission.

1. Monday at noon is feeding time! Last week we started giving them crickets, in addition to wingless fruit flies, and they gobbled them up. We’re trying to fatten up the ladies to get them to start laying eggs, and I think they’re close — I’m hoping to see egg sacs in their spacious new cages soon.

2. We have some babies! A Steatoda triangulosa that we caught over two weeks ago was already pregnant, and laid a fluffy white egg sac for us. It hatched out over the weekend, and we’ve got a small brood of baby spiderlings (see below). We’ll be separating these out into small vials today. This isn’t the species I’d planned on working on, but this will be good practice for future Parasteatoda tepidariorum spiderlings.

3. There will be another spider-feeding on Thursday at noon. They are quite avid little killing machines.

4. Also on Thursday afternoon, I depart for Minneapolis and Convergence, where I’ll be sitting on a couple of science panels. I’ll be away all weekend.

5. Next week, beginning on the 8th, Phase II of our Stevens County Spider Survey begins. We have an ever-growing list of sites to screen, and I’m also adding a few additional steps to our protocol, so all volunteers will be appreciated. We’ll be going out every day, starting at around 10, for the entire week.

6. My offer to take you out for a night at the movies still stands. I’ll be at the Morris Theater at 7pm on Wednesday for Spider-Man: Far From Home. Let me know if you’re interested — we can also pick apart the science afterwards.