Let’s try that again

Yesterday, I tried to have a remote conversation with some smart people. There were problems.

The good news: Zoom performed smoothly and well. We could hear and see everyone, we had a pleasant discussion, and everything was saved nicely locally. That’s mainly what I need for working with students.

The bad news: The parallel display in a live YouTube stream did not come off at all well. The first sign of trouble was that YouTube ignored all my prior planning and set up, and at the last minute spawned a new video stream. I don’t know what happened there at all. Then this new stream showed everyone, but only included my audio. It was a total mess for viewers at home.

When it was all over, I just killed the planned live stream, deleted the recording with only my voice, and re-uploaded the video. Here it is:

I’m going to experiment today with some private videos to iron out the kinks, and then on Wednesday evening I’ll try again with a casual conversation with some wicked SJWs and Skepticon weirdos.

Forty years ago today

Today is our 40th wedding anniversary! Sadly, because of an accursed virus, we have to spend it 800 miles apart. Our relationship is strong, though, so we’ll abide.

I did flip through our old photos, though. Here’s one with my parents and her parents on our wedding day.

To grumble a bit…we’ve got all these ancient photos that I would nowadays immediately throw out. We just had a relative with a cheap kodak point-and-shoot wander about and snap pictures, and it shows — I take sharper, brighter photos of spiders than we’ve got of the early days of our marriage. Oh, well, it’s the life that matters, these pieces of paper will just end up in a landfill in a decade or two.

Now I just have to get her back home, but even that can wait. Better that she avoids the risk and stays healthy, and it’s also important that she not spread a virus on an 800 mile transit (we have no idea whether either of us have been infected, but it’s wisest to pretend we are. We don’t need to kill immunocompromised or elderly people so we can share a cupcake and a glass of ginger ale.)

What are you doing to keep yourself sane while “socially distanced”?

I’m lucky: I have a lab full of healthy, non-infectious spiders with no other people around, so I’m going to go entertain myself by feeding them flies for a while.

I’m also unlucky: my wife flew off to Colorado before all the alerts started going up, and now we’ve decided that she’ll just have to stay there for maybe another month. Or more. Until the risks are lower. At least she has a grandbaby to provide entertainment, which is almost as much fun as a room full of spiders. It does mean my house is empty except for me and the evil cat, and that I have to do all the dishes and clean out the litter box.

I might be a little bit stir-crazy by the time Mary finally gets home.

Bring out your dead!

Reading the news from Italy is depressing. It might be us a month from now.

Now I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies. All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country.

For many Italians, the normal warnings about this virus were simply not enough to change behavior. Denial comes too easily, perhaps. It was more convenient to blame some foreign germ-spreader, or pretend that the news was unreal. Then came a reality check: Last Sunday, Pope Francis gave a benediction not from his normal window at the Vatican but via video, in part to avoid the crowd on St. Peter’s Square but also to send a message. That was the first strong sign to snap out of it.

In contrast, here’s Devin Nunes (and by proxy, the entire goddamned Republican party). The concern isn’t about keeping people healthy and alive, it’s about keeping the money flowing in the economy.

Hey, Devin: if you care so much about the “working people and their wages and tips”, why isn’t your party working to guarantee a living wage? Instead, you demand that they get out, sick or not, and service the people who are still going out to restaurants…where, if the workers are not infected, they will be by all the selfish people carrying the disease who are out there transmitting it.

Can we please not get to the point other countries are reaching, where the dead are kept with the living because no one wants to deal with the bodies?

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

Quick, everyone, get to the Wal-Mart before all the body bags are off the shelves!

A help-me-out hangout on the pandemic experience

As part of the response to moving our course content online, my university provides all the faculty a licensed copy of Zoom, which I’ve used as a client before, but have never hosted a meeting myself. I’m throwing myself into it this weekend, ironing out my awkwardness by setting up a conversation, to be held at 3pm tomorrow, 15 March. Anyone want to join in? Email me, I’ll put you on a list and send you a link. Depending on the response, I may not be able to add everyone, so tell me a few words about what you’d want to talk about. You don’t need to have licensed Zoom to be able to use it.

The subject: what we’re doing to cope with the pandemic. Fellow educators are welcome, but this is affecting everyone, so everyone has a place in the discussion. Let’s not make it a piss-and-moan session, but talk about the positive actions you are taking.

This conversation will also be streamed to YouTube, I think, if I’ve got everything figured out. Student discussions will be private in the future. You’ll be helping me to master all the details of the technology! Which also means I may fumble stuff up and the beginning might be glitchy. It’ll be fun!

Susan Collins is objectively more evil than Joe Lieberman

And Lieberman is pretty ding-danged evil. This is, I presume, an excerpt from The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, which describes all the backroom maneuvering that went on to get Obama’s stimulus bill passed. It’s what our politicians do that tells us most about their character, not what they say to the press, and whoa, was Collins behind some awful policy decisions.

So…she hates education, refusing to fund school construction, and she wanted to “kill outright” all preparations for a pandemic. When Joe Lieberman is begging you to be slightly less wicked, you know you’re a bad person, and Joe Lieberman is the earthly manifestation of centrism.

That brings back bad memories of how awful the Republicans were during the Obama administration, and now they’re even worse.

Scratch out the word “economy” and replace it with “pandemic response”, and it’s still true.

The Cutty Sark has fallen on hard times

In that post about building models as a kid, I mentioned how my old models were left behind at my grandparents’ house, and later demolished (with my permission!) by younger family members. I forgot, though, that there was one rescue, and it came home with me. My grandparents asked me to build a decorative model sailing ship for their mantel, and they bought me a kit.

I worked hard on it, since it was to be a gift for them, and it had to look good and classy. I spent months on it, and remember being a real perfectionist in getting all the shroud lines perfect and taut, staining the sails to get that perfect tone, painting every little detail. I’m proud to say that it was gloriously displayed in their living room for many years afterward, until their deaths. That was the one model my family saved from destruction and brought home for me.

It wasn’t exactly perfectly preserved.

The bowsprit was snapped off, the spars have been torn away from the masts, the rigging is sagging, it’s dusty and stained. I’m thinking, though, that it might be a pleasant project to repair over spring break…a little superglue, some delicate forceps work, I could maybe get the major stuff back in alignment and get it looking battered but presentable. I wouldn’t want it pristine, though — it has a history.

Also, when I lean in real close and sniff, I can still smell my grandfather’s cigars. They added some patina to the sails.

Anyone want to debate a creationist in Minnesota?

I got a phone call from Eric Hovind — he’s looking for someone to debate John Sanford and Danny Faulkner someplace in Minnesota next October. I turned him down flat.

Even if, in your worldview, you think you’ll make fools of them?

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re already fools.”

And that was that. Although he did ask if I’d ask around and see if anyone was interested in taking my place.

OK, so I’m asking around. I don’t recommend anyone taking him up on the offer, but if you must, contact me and I can let Hovind know how to get in touch with you.