Chew your food!

Don’t just bolt it down! Chew it until there’s no doubting it’s dead. Especially if it’s an octopus.

Stephens says that the 4.6-pound cephalopod appeared to have grabbed onto Gilligan’s larynx with a tentacle, preventing it from reconnecting to the dolphin’s breathing apparatus and effectively suffocating him to death.

“That octopus might have been, in theory, dead, but the sucker was still functional,” Stephens says, adding that while nobody wins in a situation like this, “the octopus gets a bit of a last hurrah.”

What a horrible way to go — not only choking to death, but getting your post mortem photo plastered on websites as an example of gluttony. Or being murdered by a mammal, and having your arms shown dangling from its mouth.

A flimsy excuse to do nothing

When science is being faked in the published literature, that is a big problem. You’d think the gatekeepers would want to do something about it.

In a new report now being made public by Retraction Watch, Artemisia draws attention to four main groups centered on Ali Nazari, Mostafa Jalal, a postdoc at Texas A&M University, Ehsan Mohseni of the University of Newcastle in Australia, and Alireza Najigivi of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The whistleblower lists a total of 287 potentially compromised papers in the 42-page report.

Two hundred eighty seven papers with dodgy data, all churned out by these interlinked lab groups! That’s nuts. It’s practically a criminal enterprise. Part of the problem is at the university level, where the number of papers, without concern for their content, is the metric for promotion. But it’s also a problem with the proliferation of poorly managed journals, where the sole concern is volume and collecting those publication fees.

The guilty person at the journal level here is Guido Schmitz, at the University of Stuttgart, who is the editor of the International Journal of Materials Research, where this crap is published. He had an astonishing response when the bad papers in his journal were reported to him.

I can assure that I do not like fraud in scientific results and I will do my best to prevent them. But on the other hand, I hate anonymous accusations. So it would be my pleasure to follow up this matter after you have discovered your personality to me and send contact data under which I can reach you.

Wait wait wait. Because the person reporting the problem to him, “Artemisia”, is an anonymous whistleblower, he refuses to do anything? That makes no sense. If they had a Nobel prize attached to their name, would he jump up and take care of the problem immediately? Not knowing who they are is reason enough to ignore a credible complaint? This is not how it’s supposed to work. Any action taken would not be on the basis of the say-so of the person reporting it — his fucking job is to evaluate the evidence given and act appropriately.

He has been handed documentation that shows these papers contain falsified images, and he chooses to sit on his hands and not do anything because he doesn’t see a named authority behind the complaint. It’s rank credentialism. He’s also snooty and dismissive.

I will not take any action based on an anonymous accusation. As soon as you discover your clear name, contact address and your personal motivation in this issue, I will consider the appropriate and required means.

That doesn’t matter. If Bozo the Clown hands you evidence that figures were faked and data manipulated, you do due diligence and look at the work and verify the concerns, and then you take action, based on the evidence, not your perception of the authority of the complainant. If you don’t, why were you appointed to be editor of this journal?

Cancel Culture strikes again!

Poor Mary Nicosia. She’s a victim. A wealthy, white victim of racism.

Nicosia spent much of her time at the mic complaining about the cruelty of cancel culture, saying she’s suffered since Jones announced his suit.

The mom teared up about the “unbearable pain” caused to her and her family by the lawsuit by Jones, noting how she was suspended from the board of the Landmark Society of Western New York.

“To see our entire world collapse in a matter of hours was bewildering, it was like a bad dream,” she complained.

Incomprehensible! How could this happen? She just held a Juneteenth party for her rich white friends with buckets of fried chicken and bottles of Hennessy — oh no, that has nothing to do with stereotypes — and then, while explaining herself, it’s revealed that she runs a horribly racist Twitter “parody account”. Ooops. But no, she doesn’t have a racist bone in her body!

I’d love to hear what this crap is “parodying”.

Oh. Her lawyer claims it was about making fun of liberals.

Nicosia’s lawyer, Corey Hogan, displayed the invitation for the party at the presser in an effort to absolve his client of racism, saying it was called the “1st annual Liberal Smashin Splish Splash Pool Party.”

Hogan insisted it was intended to mock liberals, and was about politics, not race, and claimed the KFC buckets were not intended to hold meaning. Most of the decorations, he said, were meant to be “liberal bashing.”

Her husband, a dentist, is also complaining that he was victimized.

Nicosia’s husband, Dr. Nicholas Nicosia, also spoke, insisting that “there’s been nothing with any interaction with us that would even suggest that we’re racist.”

Instead, he complained, it was “cancel culture” — calling it “an organized, malicious, well-orchestrated, politically charged attack” motivated in part because they were seen as a “snooty couple that lives in a big mansion.”

“It took me 32 years to build my reputation, and less than two hours to destroy it,” he sniffed.

I think he was carefully crafting a reputation that, once it was exposed outside their little bubble of entitlement and privilege, was seen to be hateful and horrible. It wasn’t cancel culture that brought it down, he’d just spent 32 oblivious years building a rotten life.

How sad. She coulda been another Libs of TikTok.

Who are these people?

I know their names — Adam Brown, Chris Kemp, Christine Peterson, Gaia Dempsey, Metaculus and Robin Hanson — but I don’t understand why anyone would listen to them babble about subjects they can’t possibly know anything about. So I started listening to this video of a panel about The Far Future & Space Tech Tree: Space & Longtermism, only to have to frequently yell, “how do you know that?” at the screen. None of it made any sense. They’re building castles in the sky on weird presuppositions.

The first guy is Robin Hanson, certifiable whack job, babbling about the risk to his vision of the far future. He’s worried that we’re going to get a world government that is too centralized and too darned successful at making people happy, and that means we’ll lose interest in taking risks, so we won’t expand to fill the galaxy out of fear of encountering big bad aliens.

Think about that. 1) There’s no evidence that a government is taking over the world, and 2) he has no grounds for psychoanalyzing trends over millions of years (yeah, he’s extrapolating over a span that’s probably longer than our species will exist), and 3) he doesn’t like the idea that humans might develop contentment and stability. That would be bad.

It’s nice in a theoretical, principled sense that the professoriate allows people to lounge about and daydream about humanity’s fantasy future, but sometimes you feel like there ought to be at least a token grounding in, you know, evidence of some kind. How could this happen? Hanson is at George Mason University, a place that has been bought lock, stock, and barrel by extremist capitalists of the very far right. The Kochs basically own the place, and it’s become a locus of power for the Federalist Society. You know, the wellspring of the very worst sort of judicial influence.

Documents obtained by alumni and students through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over the past year and one half reveal that George Mason University’s public law school has been taken over by the conservative Washington DC based Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. Since April 2016, the Federalist Society has been influencing faculty and student placement, recommending and establishing legal programs, redirecting large amounts of scholarship revenues to support the Law School’s most-politicized centers for the “Study of the Administrative State” and “Liberty and Law,” and even reorienting the Law School’s judicial law clerk program to place “conservative” law students associated with the Federalist Society as clerks to the nation’s judges.

Two years ago, on March 31, 2016, George Mason University announced that as a result of a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor and $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, it was changing the name of the Law School to the Antonin Scalia Law School. This generated intense controversy about renaming a publicly-funded state law school after one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice in history. Accompanying that controversy were concerns about inappropriate influence by an anonymous donor and the Charles Koch brothers who have long exerted control over George Mason and its affiliated Mercatus Center and Institute for Human Studies. Less known outside of legal circles is that Justice Scalia was the founding faculty advisor to the Federalist Society in 1982 and its highest-profile member and frequent speaker for the next 34 years, with four speeches at Federalist Society events in 2015 alone.

And that, in turn, reflects a distortion of our political economy by the existence of the obscenely wealthy, the billionaires who can use all their money to promote their personal, idiosyncratic beliefs and bloated egos.

One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.
The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.

That kind of money means they don’t have to touch down on reality ever, and it shows. They are not very smart people, they only know how to manipulate the system and maximize profits from their inherited wealth, and that allows them to distort the perception of reality to their advantage.

My only question is…why are really rich people drawn to longtermism? It makes no sense. It’s bad science. Maybe there’s some germ of wish fulfillment there — they imagine living forever and becoming Spaceman Spiff, and going off and dominating the universe in the same way they currently dominate the United States and UK. They want to imagine a world where rich idiots get free rein, like they Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the best way to get that is to put buffoons like Hanson in positions of intellectual influence.

Unpalatable on all counts

I don’t know which would be worse, 55,000 year old beef or the doggerel they served with it. After uncovering a frozen steppe bison in the Alaskan permafrost, this group of university people, for some unfathomable reason, decided to cut off a chunk and eat it. Then someone decide to make a poem of the meal.

The skeleton, the skin, the muscles — all in near-impeccable condition,
Guthrie named it Blue Babe, then sliced off a piece for a culinary mission.

“You know what we can do?,” he asked
Host a dinner party and with cooking the meat, I’ll be tasked.

The Blue Babe neck steak served eight,
With veggies and spices, and lots of booze they ate

Years later, writing about the taste,
Guthrie said, When thawed, one could mistake

The aroma for beef, not unpleasantly earthy.
But once in the mouth, his wife, Mary Lee Guthrie,
Told podcasters from Gimlet, it was worse than beef jerky.

Here’s what it looked like:

I would not consider for a moment the idea of putting any of that in my mouth, especially since decay and bacteria would have predigested it, and who knows what species of organisms had started breaking it down, or what byproducts had accumulated in tens of thousands of years of slow rot.

I suspect the booze was the most important ingredient in the recipe, and in the composition of the poetry.

I did it, but you didn’t make me do it! So I didn’t really do it.

Jordan Peterson had his Twitter account suspended over a bigoted tweet, and he insisted that he’d never delete it, you sons of bitches.

Guess what? He deleted it, finally. But he did it in the most petulant, childish way possible.

If you can’t see right through his game, you might just be stupid enough to be a Jordan Peterson fan.

Spider journalism isn’t great

I knew it all along. What I read in the popular press about spiders seems to be a lot of spook stories — it isn’t news unless it reaffirms peoples’ fears. I’ve wondered how bad the reporting is, and now it’s been quantified: a bit less than half are sensationalist. That’s slightly better than my impression, but still awful.

Overall, the quality of the reporting was poor: 47% of all articles contained one or more errors and 43% were sensationalist. Stories with photos of spiders or alleged bites were more likely to be sensationalized, as were stories that contained errors. Whereas quotes from medical or other experts were unrelated to sensationalism, stories that contained quotes from spider experts were much LESS likely to be sensationalized.

If it bleeds, it leads — or if it has fangs, too many legs and eyes, and is venomous, it justifies a freak-out on page 3. What to do about that?

We next conducted an analysis to describe the flow of spider news stories around the world and to get at what may be driving the spread of (mis)information about spiders online. Unsurprisingly, countries with shared languages and with higher proportions of internet users were more likely to be connected in the global network. The number of medically important spider species present (i.e., those capable of harming and potentially killing humans) also increased the connectedness of individual countries within the network. Most notably, we identified sensationalism as a key factor underlying the spread of (mis)information.

This study provides insight into what drives the global flow of information about spiders in particular, but can also teach us some more general lessons. Our results make us optimistic because they suggest a way to improve reporting on spiders, and in turn, to shift the quality and spread of online information more broadly. News stories are less sensationalized when they consult appropriate experts, and reducing sensationalism can help decrease spread of misinformation. We found that even local-scale events published by regional news outlets can quickly become broadcast internationally, which means improving news quality at the local scale can have positive effects that travel through the global network.

Journalists, you know you can pick up your phone and call your local university or extension service and contact someone knowledgeable about the species you’re planning to libel, right? It’s not hard, it makes your story better, and it doesn’t compromise your integrity. It would be less lurid and melodramatic, though.

Besides, everyone knows that spiders are really cute and playful.

Bad money drives out good, again

This was the Renaissance Center in Dickson, Tennessee. It was supposed to be an educational resource.

The Jackson Foundation created The Renaissance Center in 1999, four years after the foundation was started with the stated mission to “motivate and educate children and adults through the use of technology in the area of the arts, science and humanities.”

It took some tornado damage a year ago, but was still used to house a community college, a branch campus of Freed-Hardeman college, a planetarium, and various other properties, like a dinner theater.

No more. It’s been bought by David Rives Ministries, and they plan to put some kind of creation museum in there. Yuck.

Who, you may wonder, is David Rives? He’s a baby-faced turdlet who achieved some minor celebrity as an evangelical Christian and columnist for — Jesus, it still exists? — World Net Daily. Apparently, being a Christian fraud associated with conspiracy theories and far right politics is a recipe for riches.

Rives is the kind of guy who claims gravity is in, and only makes sense in the context of, the Bible. He’s a grinning simpleton who calls himself an amateur astronomer while rejecting most of the evidence of astronomy — he’d be laughable if he wasn’t such a goofy little gomer who mostly inspires pity.

Yet somehow he acquired the many millions of dollars needed to buy a local educational institution, spend many more millions of dollars to renovate it, and is planning to rip out anything of value inside and turn it into a collection of lies and religious bullshit.

Plans for The Wonders Center & Science Museum include replicas of life-size dinosaurs, hands-on experiments for children, space-themed exhibits, and a rare historical collection of artifacts, including ancient Biblical scrolls.

I bet he’s going to make it tax-exempt, too.

It’s less than 350 miles from Ken Ham’s parasitic fake museum, and Rives has already fired a shot across AiG’s bows, claiming it will be the largest museum of its kind. I do hope they parasitize each other’s clientele and crash and burn.