Karen has strong feelings about A Christmas Carol

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis put on a performance of the classic Dickens story. I would have been a bit peevish that it was put on before Thanksgiving, but that’s not what set Karen off. No, it was the introduction.

The incident last Friday began shortly after Haj, who directed “Carol,” gave a curtain speech welcoming everyone back to their “theater home.” Then the lights went down on the 47th edition of the Guthrie’s “Carol.” It was perhaps the most diverse production of the holiday classic to date, with a script by a Hindu playwright, staging by a Palestinian American director and a design team whose multicultural backgrounds matched that of the cast.

Then, the screeching began.

It’s kind of hard to understand, but she’s screaming about it being a British play, and at one point I hear her complaining about it being “Shakespearean”, but here’s a summary of her tirade.

The Guthrie also addressed the content of the woman’s vitriol, which delayed “Carol” for 30 minutes and caused some people to leave the theater. The woman objected to a Palestinian director staging “Carol,” which she termed “a Christian play.” She also spewed anti-Black venom, removed her mask and spit on patrons.
…
“She started mumbling right away that this is a Muslim adaptation of a Christian play,” he said. “Soon she started to berate two women taking a selfie. Then she was telling people to go back to the country they came from and calling a Black man a Black [expletive]. She was out for violence.”

The woman had removed her mask, which the theater requires all patrons to wear. When Caldeira asked her to put it back on, he said she was enraged.

“She started coughing and spitting all over me and my friend,” Caldeira said. “It was scary and frightening. I think the Guthrie has to do more to show what their real values are.”

What a nasty little snowflake. Now I feel like I should go check out the play and support the performance.

After Thanksgiving.

Debooted!

Good news: I had a check up at the doctor today, and she said I don’t have to wear the mega-clunky boot anymore! Instead, I’m downgraded to a brace.

It’s progress. Now I just have to wear this clumsy thing for a month, and as long as there is no relapse, I’ll be free before Christmas.

Curse you, Reginald C. Punnett

Yesterday, I gave my first year students a teeny-tiny quiz over the current unit in basic genetics. No biggie, I’d been hearing some troubling concerns from the class tutor that some of the students were struggling, so this was more of an assessment of how well they were grasping the simplest concepts in Mendelian genetics. Here, I’ll even let you see the entirety of the quiz: 5 questions, 2 points each.

You have a true-breeding diploid organism with the phenotype AB, and a second true-breeding organism with the phenotype ab. A is dominant to a, and B is dominant to b.

  1. What are the genotypes of these two creatures?
  2. You cross these two and obtain a clutch of F1s. What are their genotypes and phenotypes?
  3. You cross two of the F1s with each other. Predict what the phenotypes and their proportions in the next generation should be, assuming that Mendel’s laws apply.
  4. You cross one of the F1s with another organism that has the phenotype ab. Predict what the phenotypes and their proportions in the next generation should be, assuming that Mendel’s laws apply.
  5. You actually do the experiment in #4, you get the following results:
    AB: 35%
    Ab: 15%
    aB: 15%
    ab: 35%
    Interpret this distribution.

See? If you were a student who’d just suffered through 3 weeks of an introduction to genetics, you’d probably have absolutely no problem with this. If you’ve been teaching genetics for a few decades, you could answer this quiz in seconds, in your sleep, while standing on your head. I think that might be part of the problem, because this is stuff I can totally take for granted.

I gave the students 20 minutes. Most of them used the entirety of that time. I scored the quiz that afternoon, and was aghast: mean score was 2.7/10, high score was 8. Yikes. How…? Where have I gone wrong? These are smart, hard-working students, and they missed everything. Then I saw the problem. The quizzes were covered with…

PUNNETT SQUARES. Jesus. They tried to solve every problem with a 4×4 Punnett square, which is insane. Punnett squares are a tool for graphically illustrating the outcome of a cross. They are not tools for calculating the results. They are a terrible, slow, clumsy tool for doing that. The textbook is full of ’em, I think because they’re easy to draw and give the illusion of a comprehensive answer. I’d shown a few in class, because I had to explain what the textbook was showing them, but I always told them that Punnett squares were terrible and useless, but this is what they knew, probably from high school, and then reinforced by the text, and then I made the mistake of trying to explain what the book figures were showing, and they came away with the impression that this is what geneticists do. It is not. Mendelian genetics are dead simple. You can just treat each locus independently (and they’re trivial, you can memorize all the possible results if you can hold 3 frequencies in your head), solve for A, solve for B, multiply to get the answer for A & B.

Christ, they’re trying to mechanically brute-force a solution with 4×4 Punnett squares, and it’s a disaster.

I can’t blame the students, though, it’s all on me. I remember being their age and taking Dr Sandler’s genetics course at the UW, and struggling for the first few weeks, until suddenly the light bulb flicked on in my head and I saw how easy Mendel was, and then when he started layering on the advanced stuff, like segregation distorters and epistatic interactions (seriously, try solving those kinds of problems with a Punnett square — you might be able to assemble some kind of nightmarish diagram, but it’s not efficient. You can’t even do linkage with a Punnett square.), it was all just an easy arithmetic modifier added on to the basic concept. But then, Sandler was a brilliant teacher, I’ve got some catching up to do.

So how to deal with this problem…next week, I’m going to rewind and go back to the basics, review these elementary problems without Punnett squares anywhere in sight, and actively tell the students that Reginald C. Punnett was of the devil, put on this Earth to confound generations of genetics students. Then, over Christmas break, I’m going to back over my stored presentations and notes and edit out every mention of the P word. Maybe I should print one out so I can put it on the floor the first day of class and piss all over it — nah, some administrator would probably complain.

Then, you out there — yeah, YOU, high school teachers and textbook publishers — stop poisoning students minds with these abominations. I’ve never liked them, but I keep using them because they are traditional, and because the books and students come with them preloaded. Just stop it. They’re pedagogically bad. I’ve got to explicitly unteach them now.

This is a tragic setback, because what my plan for the course was saying is that I start next week on the developmental biology unit, my favorite stuff, and now it’s getting bounced back two weeks, and is going to get slammed up against the end of the term. I’m going to blame Punnett.

It is done — I am boosted

Other than the +5 disease resistance, I’ve observed no significant side effects.

That is, other than my voice acquiring a new resonance — I sound like a Decepticon now — and I occasionally emit a kind of warbling screech, like a 1990s modem, which I’m sure will clear up once the nanobots have sufficiently matured and manage to make a connection to my peers. If you’ve got the shot, we ought to try to make a borg-like hookup.

I’m getting my booster this morning, and apparently I have much to look forward to

I thought I’d just be getting further protection against a nasty virus, but no…I’m about to become an explorer in the further regions of experience.

Yes, yes, yes! I will gladly become a host to the next stage of our evolution. Fill me up with those sweet exotic alien eggs — I hear the high is incredible.

Whoa, 2.3mm? How big is the needle they are going to use? They might want to inject that IP rather than IM. Or maybe it’s written by some stupid American who has no concept of what millimeters are. Likewise, they seem obsessed with graphene oxide, unaware of how little of this material (it’s used as a carrier for biomolecules and an adjuvant) is actually present in the vaccine. It’s certainly not enough to feed my growing population of macro-sized aluminum-based tripod aliens. Where am I going to get enough graphene oxide to fuel my transformation?

If you’re worried that you might miss out on the alien occupation, don’t. I get my shot at 10:45, and then I plan to wander the streets, infecting random passers-by, strutting about with my new tripod gait — it’ll be a relief, bipedalism is such a downer when one of your legs is crippled up — and touching the community with my shiny new metallic ovipositor.

Come, meld with us, become one with the aliens, and welcome our new millimeters long overlords.

Shut up, Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman is one of the many reasons I do not and will not subscribe to the NY Times — they have way too many assholes granted a sinecure to babble their stupid opinions on one of the more prestigious newspapers in the world, and I guess all we can do is make a little effort to reduce their reputation, one reader at a time. So you’ll have to read his latest stupid column via a link to a site that skims off articles from the NYT.

Anyway, he starts off with classic centrist garbage — you know, both sides are wrong and extremist, therefore we ought to pick something in the middle.

On the one hand, liberal greens will tell you that the world is ending — but that we must not use nuclear power, an abundant source of clean energy, to stave it off. On the other hand, conservative greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that we can’t burden people with a carbon tax or a gasoline tax to slow global warming.

On a third hand, suburban greens will tell you that the world is ending, but that they don’t want any windmills, solar farms or high-speed rail lines in their backyards.

On a fourth hand, most of today’s leaders will tell you that the world is ending, so at Glasgow they’ve all decided to go out on a limb and commit their successors’ successor to deliver emissions-free electricity by 2030, 2040 or 2050 — any date that doesn’t require them to ask their citizens to do anything painful today.

He’s right that the Glasgow meetings were relatively ineffective because they were all about compromise, but isn’t that what Friedman wants? Split the difference, find a middle ground, characterize all environmentalists as wackos? He got what he wanted, so he can’t complain that his very own brand is a failure. His own solution is to further empower technocrats and corporations to engineer us out of the hole the technocrats and corporations have dug us into.

His answer is this turd to make it all worse.

In short: we need a few more Greta Thunbergs and a lot more Elon Musks. That is, more risk-taking innovators converting basic science into tools yet to be imagined to protect the planet for a generation yet to be born.

The only reason we need more Greta Thunbergs is because the Elon Musks have been running amuck. He’s not a “risk-taking innovator” — he’s a billionaire who is busy looting the planet and our economy to fuel his ego. He doesn’t do science! He spends money on whatever gives him a good return on his investment; his fantasy of launching people (not himself, obviously, other people) to Mars is flaming anti-environmentalism.

I am not surprised, though, that Thomas Fucking Friedman worships Musk as his Space Jesus.

It’s not nice to make fun of Southern yokels

Actual portrait of Josh Axe

No, really, I know there are lots of smart people in the South, just as I know there are a lot of stupid people here in the Yankee states (oh boy, do I know). But you’d think the educational institutions in Southern states would know better than to set themselves up as the butt of a joke. Kentucky has a special problem, since they’re home to Answers in Genesis, the Creation “Museum”, and the Ark Park. So what the hell is Kentucky Educational Television doing?

I think I’ll just quote one of those smart Kentuckians, Dan Phelps, on this one.

If someone dies, what will KET say?

Back in August, during a fundraiser, Kentucky EDUCATIONAL Television aired an infomercial for “Dr. Josh Axe” a chiropractor. He touted his version of “ancient remedies.” Every ten seconds or so of his spiel, the camera did a close-up of the grinning/nodding zombies in the audience nodding their heads in total agreement. Some of the things he said concerning diet made sense, but why couldn’t the PBS station get someone reputable to say that? Most of the “ancient remedies” touted seem to based on symbolism. For example:

“Tomatoes have four chambers, just like your heart.”
“Mushrooms are the same shape as adrenal glands”
“Carrots in section look like the eyes iris”
“Walnuts look like brains”
“Celery looks like bones”
“Beets are the color of blood…”
“The color of the food will tell you what part of the body it will heal.”

More recently, the website “The Encyclopedia of American Loons” did a nice entry on Axe.

Today I was looking at KET’s schedule and found they are showing more of Axe’s infomercials in late November (see photo).

Why KET? Why? If someone dies, what will KET say?

Rational Wiki also has an entry on Axe. He also has an inordinately popular YouTube channel if you’d rather hear him say stupid things with his own mouth, but since he already has 2 million subscribers I won’t link to it.

By the way, Josh Axe is from Ohio.

This is the flibbertigibbetiest

I swear, this abomination reads like it was written by a 15 year old sorority girl high on meth, but it’s actually by Boris Johnson’s sister. Really, try reading it — it flits about from topic to topic, from her dog having puppies to prating about her mother’s maiden name to weird complaints about not being sufficiently conservative while saying…

It has been a source of mystery to me and no doubt many others that I manage to host a radio show without landing in the soup more often. I’m always saying things like, ‘But are we allowed to say Liverpool Women’s Hospital any more?’ and ‘I only want to see someone in a surgical face mask in an operating theatre’ and ‘If lockdowns work, why are we having another one and if lockdowns don’t work, why are we having another one?’ But then I realise I am a mere soggy centrist snowflake compared with some.

Don’t worry, strange lady, you’re a right-wing asshole, no question.

And then she drops this on us:

Wow. Humble bragging, name dropping, and casual sympathy for a procurer for a pedophile. I felt like throwing up over everything between the headline and the final line.

She has a radio show and publishes in the Spectator? Man, the United States isn’t the only country parasitized by a colony of superficial twits.