Have you ever had one of those days where you’re relieved to only have to work with things?

I have only a few term papers to read, and I don’t have to deal with students at all for a while. I like students and am happy to work with them most of the time, but right now I am so looking forward to retreating into my lab and dealing nothing but things. No committee meetings, no office hours, no engagement with human beings at all, just microscopes, cameras, and most importantly, spiders. Yesterday I only had a little lab time, and it was so soothing to see all the long-legged beasties hanging upside down in their sprawling webs, waiting for food. Today I give it to them, and they will be so appreciative. And undemanding.

It’s a good life, being a spider, all solitary and patient.

You can’t go back again in Star Wars

I have really good memories of the first Star Wars, back in 1977, and the latest installment made me rethink them. What genuinely thrilled me in the first movie was that it was like nothing else out there — it was strange, it was original, it was an odd mashup of a fantasy novel and a space opera, it was…creative. It was also epic and heroic and all those good things.

But here’s the problem with that: you can’t get that enthralling sense of newness and surprise if you keep going back to the same material again and again. At the same time, the corporations running the game don’t want to gamble, they want to milk the same cow ten thousand times. You can walk into this new Star Wars movie and enjoy yourself because it is comfortable and familiar and rehashes the old tropes yet again, and that’s fine — it’s just like that new Scorsese movie, The Irishman, because it is like every other gangster movie that’s been released in the last 40 years. Great, if that’s what you want.

If what drew you to Star Wars in the first place was the novelty and creativity, though, it’s not here. This movie has the Hero-Discovers-They-Had-Royal-Blood-All-Along. It has the Villain-Who-Is-Redeemed. It has the Overwhelming-Evil-Force-With-One-Itty-Bitty-Weak-Spot. It has the Battle-In-The-Throne-Room, while Space-Battle-Seems-To-Be-Doomed going on at the same time. It has Porgs…and Ewoks! It is McDonalds and KFC and Burger King, the old reliables that produce the same thing everywhere and everytime, but will never ever astonish you. It’s been commoditized.

I was actually getting pissed off and disappointed during this movie, because it totally lacks any creativity or unexpected shocks. It’s as if JJ Abrams went through all the old entries in the Star Wars universe, picked out all the memorable themes, dumped them into a blender, and poured the resultant slurry out on a tray and served it up to the audience confident that they’d recognize the scraps of the old flavor and love it. And he’s right. People will eat it up and make the corporation lots of money. I shouldn’t be disappointed, because this movie wasn’t made for me. Sometimes people want formulaic nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Except…there is reason to be worried. The dominant forces in science fiction entertainment are Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel Superhero movies, pure comfort food that provide little intellectual stimulation. We have to hope the flood of money pouring in for the predictable and familiar encourages them to take an occasional gamble on some weird one-off like Annihilation or Arrival or Watchmen.

We also have to hope the good ones don’t get coopted into long-running mega-franchises, because all that can happen with that is that they’ll be run into the ground and turn into deep furrows that limit originality. In art, death is good, opening the doors of change and inspiring new ideas, so let these series die. I fear, though, that now that the Evil Empire of Disney has seized control, Zombie Star Wars is going to be revived and walk the earth forevermore.

I’m not one of the grown-ups in the room

You should all know by now that my wife Mary is the mature adult at my house. While I fled to the movie theatre to watch a tired fantasy about space wizards, Mary stayed home to watch the Democratic debate and all the follow-up news stories — I think she eventually crawled into bed in the early hours of the morning. I don’t know what she thought of the candidates because she’s still unconscious in the other room.

I can guess, though. She’s very dedicated to getting Bernie elected. In fact, I’m beginning to fear the election because I’m inclined more towards Warren, but if Bernie loses there will be much anger and anguish here. If I didn’t do my part by voting for Bernie in the primary, I might get the icy glare of rage and death afterwards.

So while she is recovering from her binge mainlining politics last night, I turned to Amanda Marcotte to find out how the debate went down.

Klobuchar, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all came across the actual grown-ups in the room. Sanders, as usual, impressed with his moral clarity. Klobuchar is an unapologetic centrist, but presented a strong case for her competence as a leader and ability to pull the levers of power to get things done. Warren, in particular, took advantage of the time to show off her earnest intelligence and in-depth knowledge of both policy and the strategies needed to get those policies passed.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I’d rather not see Klobuchar as the candidate, but she does have a reputation in her home state for being a tenacious fighter who would run a strong campaign. But I don’t want a centrist. Warren wins me over with her brains. Sanders really does have a strong moral vision of what is right and is probably the best anti-Trumper we’ve got.

Buttigieg, Steyer, Yang, and most of all Biden aren’t even in the running for space in my mind. I want them gone. I’d give more credibility to Castro and Booker, and they weren’t even on the stage, which tells you there’s another deep problem with the Democratic machine.

Warning! Pure Farmland Plant-Based Burger Patties!

As a vegetarian, we’re always on the lookout for new alternatives for the menu. We’ve been mostly happy with an occasional “Beyond Meat” burger — except for the expense and the excessive packaging — so when our local grocery store started stocking this other meat alternative, we thought we’d give it a try. Slightly cheaper, 4 patties to a package, so slightly less packaging, it seemed like a good deal. It’s called Pure Farmland Plant-Based Burger Patties.

I have learned to appreciate the hard work that had to go into producing “Beyond Meat” burgers, because everything about these was off. Right away, as I was cooking them on a medium low heat, they were oozing this brownish oil that sizzled and smelled nasty. I had my doubts right away. I cooked them thoroughly and served ’em up, and noticed another phenomenon…they were orange. They didn’t taste as bad as they smelled, but still, there was a peculiar after-taste.

It looks like someone rushed a product to market after noticing the popularity of the genre, and didn’t quite put the work in to master flavor, texture, and color. It probably won’t kill me, but I probably won’t buy them ever again, either.

In case you’re interested in trying them, not recommended unless you really like the flavor of burning petroleum by-products.

Cell biology…done!

All finals graded, and the final grades submitted to the registrar. It feels good.

One of the easy questions I asked on the final is for them to tell me what they learned in class that they expected to forget immediately after the exam. The most common answers were photosynthetic pathways (might be an animal bias emerging there) and the lac operon (eep! Gene regulation is my favorite unit of the course!).

Then, weirdly, I had a bank of essay questions that they allowed them to, at their discretion, skip one. They included questions about photosynthesis, the lac operon, and cell motility. Guess which one almost everyone skipped? Cell motility! I guess they studied the subjects they hated the hardest, which may be why they wanted to forget them as quickly as they could.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely done. I’ve got one other class, biological communications, in which the students have to work with me on writing a 10-15 page paper. I gave one student an extension, so the last of those will be turned in tomorrow, and then I finish grading that by the weekend. Then I’m free!

I’ll still be trying to catch a Star War tonight.

Adam Driver and I have something in common

Besides our facility with the Force, that is. He doesn’t like to listen to or watch himself, and walked out of an interview when they threatened to play a clip. He has a history of doing that.

…in a New Yorker profile in October 2019, interlocutor Michael Schulman described Driver’s reluctance to watch himself as a “phobia.” The actor himself recalled feeling nauseous during a première of Star Wars: The Force Awakens; and hiding out in a greenroom during a screening of BlacKkKlansmen.

There are videos others have made of me floating around on the internet. I never watch them. Never. I feel a cringe crawling right up my guts when I encounter them. It’s peculiar because I don’t mind public speaking at all, it’s just seeing it again that makes me want to cry. When I started making youtube videos of my own, the hardest part was editing — I have to pretend that’s some dull old stranger in the recording so I can chop out the really bad bits, and then I don’t watch them ever again once they’re online.

It’s nice to see that even famous movie stars share this problem. See? I’m normal! Are you normal?

Another test of the upsuck hypothesis

There’s an interesting argument that’s been raging for decades about women’s orgasms: are they useful or not? Normal people, especially women, are probably wondering how that can even be a question — you probably find them very nice — but that’s missing a deeper point, which is, do women’s orgasms increase their fertility? Which I would argue masks an even deeper question, which is about women’s Ultimate Purpose. And apparently, the ultimate purpose of having a woman orgasm is that it makes her cervix more likely to slurp up the manly ejaculate, a phenomenon called upsuck or insuck.

On to this paper by Robert King, Maria Dempsey, and Katherine Valentine. It’s a weak paper, but the authors, to their credit, acknowledge the weaknesses and submit it as primarily a method of testing one aspect contributing to potential fertility problems that individuals can test for themselves in their home. The procedure is simple. Six women (they also admit that their n was tiny) were each given a Mooncup, a rubbery device usually used as an alternative to tampons or pads, a supply of an artificial semen simulant, a 10ml syringe, a spoon, and a surgical glove, and sent home to masturbate. Their instructions were to first use the syringe to squirt 5ml of fake semen into their vaginas, and then flip a coin. Half the time they would masturbate to orgasm, and the other half they would masturbate for roughly the same amount of time, but then stop before orgasm, as a control. The next step was to place the mooncup over their cervix, and after an hour, remove it and measure how much of the fake semen had flowed back out of the upper reaches of their reproductive tract, which they were then to measure with the syringe.

Sounds romantic, I know.

The hypothesis was that muscle contractions during orgasm would propel semen deeper into their bodies, and that as they later relaxed, it would flow back into the mooncup, so they could compare the amount squirted up into the uterus/fallopian tubes/etc. in orgasmic vs. non-orgasmic situations. The prediction was that if orgasm were effective at increasing semen flow into relevant parts of the reproductive tract, they’d see more retention of semen after an orgasm. The answer is…they did.

I have a few problems with the study. As already mentioned, it has a minuscule number of participants, but also, it is not at all a blind study. The subjects knew what the expected result should be! I would not accuse them of outright cheating, but it’s very human to see an experiment that is purportedly testing the potency of your orgasms as a judgment, and that maybe a little fudging in one direction or another is acceptable. I’m also wondering why the contribution of the women’s fluids to the outcome wasn’t taken into account; they specifically excluded situations where the women produced female ejaculation, but as the investigators must know, women will produce more vaginal fluids with orgasm than without, which would have contributed to the volumes they measured.

One of the biggest problems of interpretation, though, is that nothing in this study actually tests fertility and the odds of conception. I would take it for granted that triggering vigorous contractions in a muscular, fluid-filled tube is going to move those fluids all over the place, but the question is whether this contributes significantly to successful fertilization. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, nothing in these observations answers that question, or even whether this is a relatively significant factor compared to all the other variables in conception.

But that is the biggest problem of them all. If you’re trying to determine whether there is a selective advantage to a woman having an orgasm, why focus exclusively on the mechanical effectiveness of getting her pregnant? Humans are psychologically and sociologically complex, responsive to all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle cues, and with a huge amount of individual variation. Looking at what is essentially the very last step in an elaborate courtship dance and declaring that that is the critical thing that evolution is looking at tends to kind of minimize an intricate behavioral complex that is also subject to evolutionary forces.

This reductive, narrow approach to a tiny aspect of a question is a common approach in some disciplines. Another subset tends to view programmed female responsiveness to male signals as the mechanistic goal of evolution. Evolutionary psychology, I’m looking at you.

King R, Dempsey M, Valentine KA (2016) Measuring sperm backflow following female orgasm: a new method. Socioaffect Neurosci Psychol. doi: 10.3402/snp.v6.31927

Impeachment? I’m not enthusiastic

Now if we were talking firing squads, guillotines, or rioting mobs tearing down every stick and brick of the White House, I might be roused enough to cheer. Today, though, I see a criminal running the country, an entire political party dedicated to corruption over democratic representation, and an electorate that wants to negate every aspect of human progress in the USA and celebrate the barbarity of oppression, so excuse me if I don’t get excited about plodding procedural maneuvering by bureaucrats cautious about protecting their privileges. Especially when I expect Republican sycophants to block any change, while continuing to pack the judiciary with incompetents and ideologues.

I expect my grandchildren will remember this era not for the clown in the oval office, but for the way we ignored real crises in the environment and civil rights, fueled by a selfish majority and short-sighted politicians. They’re going to wonder what was wrong with us that we didn’t storm the halls of power and change our course right now.

Oh, well. We’ve got a dedicated thread for discussing the infuriating political situation. Join in there! I just don’t have the heart anymore.