We’re going to the Moon again?

While all the headlines have been about the ego-trips of a trio of billionaires, it seems I failed to notice the substantive plans of an international coalition of space agencies. They have some ambitious goals for the coming decade.

Among the different initiatives:

  • The first launch of the SLS is slated for this year, with a human landing on the moon earmarked for 2024. NASA has christened this new wave of lunar exploration its Artemis program.
  • Russia and China have recently announced a similar collaborative effort. They plan to build the International Lunar Research Station somewhere on the moon. The hope is to have human visitors by the mid-2030s.
  • The European Space Agency (ESA) has started Project Moonlight, an effort to build a constellation of satellites around the moon for navigation and communications.

Some observers have spoken of a “second space race” pitting the United States against China and Russia.

“I think that’s alarmist rhetoric; it has a lot of baggage,” says Todd Harrison, director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “The previous space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was an outright competition about being first. Now, it’s … about who’s going to have the best coalition of countries.”

The Artemis program seeks to lay down guiding principles for the civil exploration and use of space, starting with the moon but extending to Mars, asteroids, and comets. To date, 12 countries have embraced the Artemis Accords.

Russia and China, meanwhile, are inviting international partners to join them in their moon-base project.

Let the rich boys play with their toys — or rather, don’t, tax the space dilettantes and make them stop their stupid efforts at putting their stupid dicks into brief spurts of parabolic flight. This is the real deal: taking the effort to build scientific infrastructure in space, which could be a useful foundation for more science. Cooperative efforts by multiple nations to do science? Yes, please. I could support that. I think in the long run Space Socialism will be better and more productive than the current Space Capitalism. I will also be impressed if humans return to the Moon in — checks calendar — just two years? For real? Make it so.

Unfortunately, I do have some reservations, ala Gil Scott-Heron.

Francis Becenti

I have to temper that concern with the statement that all of science is a kind of luxury, an investment in long-term thinking, and you can always make a legitimate argument that we have more pressing problems to spend our money on. However, I also believe that it’s a worthy goal if it is done equitably, if all people have the opportunity to participate, and if the benefits are spread far and wide, rather than being a big funnel to drain more money into the pockets of the already wealthy, or an excuse for billionaires to mug for the camera.

Dang, it can be annoying when medicine works too well

I’ve been under medication for high blood pressure for over a decade now, and it works — my blood pressure has been under control and in the normal range ever since. Except…at my last checkup on Tuesday. Now it’s down around 100/60, which is getting down in the hypotensive range. I suspect it’s a combination of aging and all the hot weather causing some dehydration. I’m feeling a bit strange, though.

The doctor warned me to watch out for faintness or light-headedness when rising up to stand, and what do you know, this morning I briefly felt like I was going to pass out when I stood up. Now I have to worry about something novel: I’ve been carrying around nitroglycerin all these years, never had to use it, it just crumbles to dust in the bottle and I have to get a fresh stock every six months or so, just in case. I’m afraid now that if I faint somewhere, someone will shout, “It’s his heart!”, fumble through my pockets for medication, and then give me a potent vasodilator. Yay. Of all the things that are going to kill me, hypotension wasn’t high on the list.

My doctor is going to revise my medications and dial down the blood pressure stuff. Reducing the number of pills I have to take every day will be a nice change.

Also, my bad cholesterol is way way down, and I cut my triglycerides in half, which I attribute to living on a vegetarian/Mediterranean diet for the last year. That means I get to eat all the ice cream and cookies that I want now. Right? That’s how it works, I think. Big scoop of lard on a sugar cone, maybe, sprinkled with Pixie Sticks dust.

Another silly scientific claim from Islam

The magic fly wings are back. I got this email yesterday:

Dear doctor Myers,
I’ve read your old article on the study about a saying of Muhammad that advised people to dip a fly if it landed on their drinks. Recently I’ve found an article (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jnsv/66/Supplement/66_S283/_pdf) which honestly seems to me even more unscientific, but there is one thing that I don’t understand that I hope you may clarify. The fact is that this study doesn’t seem to have been published in a predatory journal, I’ve searched the journal and the publisher but I haven’t find them on the predatory publishing list. Maybe it is because the journal is Japanese(I’ve read articles about how many Indonesian studies were published in predatory journal but nothing about this specific publisher). By the way I’ve done a bit of research on this study and I found something which convinces me even more of my first thoughts, but I don’t have enough knowledge to debunk the study itself.

In the paper they quote 4 studies to support their claims:
-Reference number 9 was published on a predatory journal (called IDOSI).
-Reference number 7 is the experiment at Qassim University which you have talked about.
-References number 10 come from a book about miracles of the Quran, that was originally in Arabic and was later translated in Indonesian. It supposedly quotes a study from this book but since I don’t know the languages I don’t know how to search. But the fact that it quotes just the book and not the supposed study is very suspicious.
-Reference number 11 is from something in Indonesian language about “miracles” of the hadiths, I couldn’t find anything like this and the only other source where this is cited is from a larger paper (also in Indonesian)of the same author of this study, which basically talks about the same things.
All the sources are islamic, the study itself was done in a islamic university in Indonesia specialized in islamic teachings, probably by undergrad students of the nutrition faculty.

As I’ve said the only thing that I don’t understand is why this study was published on a non predatory journal, and I can’t refute it by myself. I hope you may give your opinion on this paper.

Here’s my article that they reference. The point being made on the basis of an Islamic hadith, If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for the one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure of the disease, is that the left wings of flies are dirty and full of bacteria, but the right wings have strong antibiotic properties. Only the right wing, mind you! This is from a book compiled in the 9th century, so it’s a remarkable assertion that was made without any application of scientific observation or empirical data collection — just poof, the idea came out of the mouth of some sage.

This, unfortunately, is the abstract for the new paper in question:

It’s a very badly written paper, like the work of a lazy undergraduate; of course, we also have to consider that this was written by an Indonesian student in English, not their native language. Still, it’s a naive bit of work that was done with little effort in the course of a few days that were somehow stretched out over 6 months.

It’s a simple experiment. Snip the wings off flies, dip them in water…wait, the protocol is weird. They have a negative control, water contaminated with E. coli, and a positive control, sterile water, (I feel like they labeled those backwards) but then they only test the right wings of flies dipped in contaminated water. This is peculiar, because they never test the left wings, despite the fact that this is a five-minute experiment that is then cultured on a petri dish for two days, with the assay consisting of simply counting colonies on the dish, and they only did it twice, with the only variable being the number (1, 2, or 3) of right wings they used. That’s it! And they published it!

You want to see the results? OK, here they are in all their glory.

I spent way too much time puzzling over this for such a garbage paper. There are five sets of data, but only two lines on the chart; the blue line goes up over time, but the legend says blue is either one right wing or the negative control (which is the water contaminated with E. coli), the orange is the positive control (the sterile water), which is flatlined as you might expect. There is no observable data for the different numbers of wings. In the text they state that the number of wings didn’t matter — all two of the measurements for one, two, or three wings showed no colony growth. They don’t even do a comparison of left and right wings, which is the heart of their claim about the accuracy of Islam.

It’s remarkably trivial and bad, and it’s little more than a grade school science fair experiment. And it got published.

To address my correspondent’s questions:

  • I don’t know how you’re going to define “predatory journal”. This looks like a journal with extremely low standards for publication, is that predatory? It’s more of a waste-of-time journal.
  • That the journal is Japanese or the authors Indonesian is irrelevant. There is extremely good research coming out of both countries, and there is extremely bad research published in American journals by American authors.
  • Lists of predatory journals are never complete. This particular journal has been around since 1954, has a low impact factor, and who knows what changes have occurred in the editorial board? It’s just flying under the radar.
  • Every science article needs to be evaluated on the basis of its content. It doesn’t matter if it’s published in Nature or the Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology

    • (although, really, that title would make me question it), you have to consider each paper’s ideas. A journal like Nature has a rather more demanding filter than J Sci Nutr Vitaminol, obviously; that latter seems to be more of a wide open sphincter than any kind of filter.

Also, an article that in its introduction mentions that the idea they’re testing is contrary to the facts in the field, but that Muslims must still believe and be sure of the truth of the hadith is setting up a bias which demands a significantly more robust set of observations than this half-assed lazy casual “experiment”. If they are making a radical claim that defies all the observations and theories current in the field, they damn well better put in the work!

Find the bodies

The Circle of Nations Indigenous Association put out a call to search our campus for graves a month ago.

June 14. 2021

CW: Indian Boarding Schools, Historical Trauma, Cultural Genocide.

Circle of Nations Indigenous Association calls upon UMN Morris to make immediate plans to search for unmarked gravesites of children buried on/near our present-day campus.

How many colleges in America have 2-7 murdered children buried underneath their campuses? How many colleges have gone decades without intending to search for these remains and return them to their families? These circumstances are unacceptable.

Since 2019, UMN Morris has committed to a policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our campus’s history. We believe honoring this commitment is impossible without searching for these children and returning them to their homes, so that their spirits and their kinships may heal as well.

We are thankful for the University’s decision to cooperate with the Department of Interior’s review of federal Indian boarding schools. However, it would be more appropriate if the university led the search itself, with constant, close collaboration from tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the United States federal government.

Search the School.
Circle of Nations Indigenous Association

Our student leaders seconded that suggestion.

There is a petition.

The University of Minnesota-Morris has a moral obligation to make immediate plans to search the school for the unmarked burial sites of the 2-7 Indian boarding school victims. These children must then be returned to their home communities so their spirits and families can heal.

This is an essential action step towards fulfilling UMN Morris’s policy of truth telling, understanding, and healing in regards to our institution’s history as a former Indian boarding school.

In June 2021, outgoing Chancellor Michelle Behr announced the University’s willingness to cooperate with the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

However, we prefer that the search be conducted by an Indigenous ground-penetrating radar specialist, in constant collaboration with tribal nations and our Indigenous campus community, rather than the federal government – an institution responsible for destructive policies towards Native American people, including Indian boarding schools.

I assume that number of 2-7 comes from some historical evidence. I hope it isn’t more. If there are unmarked graves on or near campus, I agree that we have an obligation to find them.

I mean, really, the Republicans hate evolution so much they’ll kill everyone out of spite

If you’re looking for some fun summer beach reading, I can’t recommend this article, The origins and potential future of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a summary of the past year of the pandemic.

One year into the global COVID-19 pandemic, the focus of attention has shifted to the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs). After nearly a year of the pandemic with little evolutionary change affecting human health, several variants have now been shown to have substantial detrimental effects on transmission and severity of the virus. Public health officials, medical practitioners, scientists, and the broader community have since been scrambling to understand what these variants mean for diagnosis, treatment, and the control of the pandemic through nonpharmaceutical interventions and vaccines. Here we explore the evolutionary processes that are involved in the emergence of new variants, what we can expect in terms of the future emergence of VOCs, and what we can do to minimise their impact.

Oh, right, I really don’t want to hear about how “several variants have now been shown to have substantial detrimental effects on transmission and severity of the virus”, but they do, and it’s a worry. Here, for example:

So the reassuring (and unsurprising) fact is that the virus isn’t really being selected directly for lethality. Doesn’t that make you feel better? All the virus ‘cares’ about is increasing the number of viruses, of increasing the viral load, and it could do that by having milder effects on their host. The B.1.1.7 variant isn’t doing that. It is increasing the load in your cells with no ameliorating mutations, and so is having more severe effects.

In case you were wondering, B.1.1.7 is going by the common name of the Alpha variant. It’s not nice. At the end of that excerpt, it says a bit about the B.1.167.2 variant, which is even nastier, with 64% greater transmissibility. You probably know it better as the Delta variant, which is now the dominant strain in the US.

You know there are also Beta, Kappa, Theta, and Zeta variants, right? I can’t keep track of them all. I guarantee that more will be arising. Isn’t evolution amazing? If only we lived in a country where the power of evolution was appreciated.

The article tries to be encouraging in its conclusion.

As COVID-19 transitions from a pandemic to an endemic disease, VOCs present new global challenges to health by virtue of increased transmissibility and virulence and evasion of natural and vaccine-induced immunity. In this article we have explored the selective forces that shape how VOCs emerge and become established. We also identify possible steps that we can take to limit their emergence and, when they do arise, their impact. Moving forward, we must also consider how SARS-CoV-2 transmits to and amongst other animal species, placing both them and us at further risk. It will therefore be important to adopt a multidisciplinary One Health approach for future pandemic management that accounts for the interrelated nature of human, animal, and ecosystem health.

Oh, good, steps to limit the emergence and impact of variants…[quickly flips back a few pages to see what those are].

More broadly, we can reduce the rate of emergence of new VOCs and slow the spread of existing ones by reducing overall case numbers through vaccination at a global scale and by maintaining or enhancing the non-pharmaceutical interventions that have contributed to controlling the pandemic (case detection and isolation, contact tracing and quarantine, masking and personal distancing, and improved ventilation). Having low case numbers makes it easier to test and genotype a high fraction of cases and increases the efficacy of contact tracing measures to stop onward transmission. Furthermore, mathematical models predict that measures that reduce contact rates with susceptible individuals will not only slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 overall but will also reduce the relative advantage of variants that have a transmission advantage. Thus, the measures taken to reduce contacts and limit the number of COVID-19 cases may have the added benefit of slowing the rate at which VOCs with a transmission advantage overtake the wildtype. This predicted pattern, with selection weakening as stringency measures are increased, appears to be borne out in data for B.1.1.7 from England and British Columbia.

So, all we need to do is vaccinate everyone, keep wearing masks and maintain social distancing…how is that working out for you, America? It’s basic stuff, it’s all within our reach, but it’s Republican policy to deny every one of those actions. Keep it in mind that their policies aren’t just killing their constituents, they’re also increasing the likelihood of new variants that will harm non-Republicans, even in Democratic states, and even in foreign countries that want nothing to do with our contemptible politics.

To be fair, I shouldn’t blame only Republicans. My university is opening up in the fall with no vaccination requirement, and is debating reducing the social distancing requirement.

Now that’s stolen valor

Another election fraud case by Sydney Powell and Lin Wood is going down in flames as a Michigan judge finds their affidavits of voting shenanigans in Detroit were not responsibly vetted. “There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement … that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said. They had not.

Going through the list of rejected claims, one jumped out at me.

One declaration came from a witness referred to by the lawyers in court documents only as “Spider.” In his sworn declaration, he claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered server traffic revealing that Iran and China had tampered with the election. But The Washington Post revealed in December that “Spider” was actually a 43-year-old Texas-based information technology consultant named Joshua Merritt who never worked in military intelligence.

Records show he enrolled in a training program with a military intelligence battalion but never completed the entry-level course, an Army spokeswoman told The Post. Records show that Merritt spent most of his decade in the U.S. Army as a wheeled-vehicle mechanic.

How dare he steal the honorable name of “Spider”! Can he be arrested for that?

I suspect that the more serious accusation is that he lied about his credentials and expertise. Being a “wheeled-vehicle mechanic” is an honorable job that does require considerable skill and knowledge — my father was a mechanic, too — but it probably doesn’t prepare you in military intelligence or cybersecurity, and doesn’t involve any training in cracking the information communications going on in Iran and China.

This kind of thing is all Powell and Wood have — people swearing that they saw a mysterious bag that could have held ballots, that sort of thing, and the lawyers didn’t carry out even a superficial scrutiny of the claims.

If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.

Yes, please.

By the way, you may have heard that one of the lawyers was weeping, and later resigned from the Wood/Powell team. This wasn’t because she was humiliated in court. She later said she wasn’t crying, she was just furious because no one was defending her hero Donald Trump as he deserved.

“Google, show me the naturalistic fallacy”

Here we go, Rob Schmitt, an announcer on Newsmax illustrating not just the naturalistic fallacy, but also diving deep to show us how conservative news networks are in a competition to represent the dumbest possible take on everything:

Obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. I mean, if there is some disease out there…maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.

Then he brings on Dr. Peter McCullogh, the latest “expert” who has been making the rounds of the conservative talking heads talk on TV about how we don’t know about the side-effects of vaccines and you don’t really need to be vaccinated and COVID-19 isn’t that dangerous, and he doesn’t push back at all on that garbage — instead he tells us that “natural immunity” is superior.

I can’t watch Fox News, so I’m sure not going to be able to avoid death by apoplexy if I started watching Newsmax or OAN. Fortunately, other people do. Here’s Sam Seder and his crew dismantling this nonsense — really, you don’t need a Ph.D. in Science to see what’s wrong with that argument, or to list a whole lot of “unnatural” things that people naturally do.

Unfortunately, pointing out the bad science doesn’t address the real problem in that “news” cast, which I think is embodied in the statement that he thinks about the way everything works. He’s got a larger model in his head of what Nature is that incorporates all these assumptions about teleology and purpose and the proper functioning of the world, and the reason he’s embracing this absurd notion of vaccines being an intrusion on nature is that that clicks with all of his priors. It’s not that he’s actually thought about vaccines in any coherent way, it’s that he’s cobbled up a way of thinking about the world from non-rigorous, ideologically anti-science institutions and authorities, that make him more comfortable with adopting a lie than with accepting an idea that would shake up his notions of how the world properly works.

He’s also driven by tribalism and fear. Schmitt also complained that it is despicable that the high and mighty Left and the media [are] ridiculing so many people for questioning vaccines, and look, he’s getting ridiculed, confirming the truth of his beliefs!

He’s also indulging in an amazing amount of projection.

It’s become so politicized, and many liberals will pump these vaccines into themselves and to their children simply to prove their loyalty to ‘science,’ ’cause that’s the in-thing to do right now.

Uh, I don’t want my children vaccinated because I’m virtue-signaling at science, or because it’s fashionable. It’s because I do have an ideological commitment to accepting the facts, and right now 99.5% of the COVID-19 related deaths are hitting the unvaccinated. That’s the brute reality that’s pounding on Rob Schmitt’s head, trying to tell him his mental model is invalid.

Well, also, there’s an emotional revulsion against the idea that a certain amount of people need to be “wiped out”, which is a sociopath’s creed.

This cannot end well, Tennessee

The insanity is going too far. Tennessee (or rather, Republicans in Tennessee) want to shut down access to vaccines. All vaccines.

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.

The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month. The decisions to end vaccine outreach and school events come directly from Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, the internal report states.

Additionally, the health department will take steps to ensure it no longer sends postcards or other notices reminding teenagers to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines. Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.

That’s amazing. I’m used to Republicans opposing fundamental ideas in science, but now the prion disease that rots their brains has progressed so far that they want to silence information about basic health care. There will be dead teenagers as a result of this policy, and this will lead to another spike in coronavirus infections.

And these changes will take effect just as the coronavirus pandemic shows new signs of spread in Tennessee. After months of declining infections, the average number of new cases per day has more than doubled in the past two weeks – from 177 to 418. The average test positivity rate has jumped from 2.2% to 5.4% in the same time period.

Oh, it already has.

Republicans are a menace to society.

Off to be needled and poked

Today is the day I get my big annual physical — I’m going to spend my morning getting bled and inspected and told that I’m an awful mess who is probably going to die soon. It’ll be fun! If I were a masochist, I’d be paying good money to strip naked and sit in one of those humiliating hospital gowns while my woman doctor tells me all the things that are wrong with me. If I’m really lucky, she’ll be joined by a doctor from the Twin Cities and my horrid shape will also be captured by video cameras.

Except I’m not a masochist and I don’t get off on humiliation, darn it.

I get to do this every year, until I’m dead. Looking on the bright side, maybe it won’t be too many more years.

I’m back. All the tests came back fine, even improved from last year. My inevitable demise has been slightly delayed. Unless, that is, Death is just trying to lull me into a sense of false optimism before springing a big surprise.