Every state should do this

At least Minnesota has the right priorities.

Today, lawmakers in the Minnesota House of Representatives voted to pass HF 1, the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act. This bill protects Minnesotans’ right to contraception, the right to carry a pregnancy to term, and the right to abortion, and ensures the right to privacy for personal reproductive health decisions. It also prevents interference by politicians who seek to enact or defend medically unnecessary barriers to comprehensive reproductive health care.
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The bill enshrines protections for all reproductive health care, including but not limited to contraception, sterilization, preconception care, maternity care, abortion care, family planning and fertility services, and counseling regarding reproductive health care. The bill now awaits action from the Senate.

Also, keep it up, Leslie Jones.

You know you’re in a fascist state when they plan to arrest librarians

Right next door to me is the state of North Dakota. They’re up to no good.

Books containing “sexually explicit” content — including depictions of sexual or gender identity — would be banned from North Dakota public libraries under legislation that state lawmakers began considering Tuesday.

The GOP-dominated state House Judiciary Committee heard arguments but did not take a vote on the measure, which applies to visual depictions of “sexually explicit” content and proposes up to 30 days imprisonment for librarians who refuse to remove the offending books.

You might be wondering what the libraries are peddling. Hard core porn? BDSM? Incest how-tos? Nah. The Republicans are happy to tell you what disturbs them.

House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, of Dickinson, introduced the bill and said public libraries currently contain books that have “disturbing and disgusting” content, including ones that describe virginity as a silly label and assert that gender is fluid.

But…virginity is a silly label! And gender is clearly fluid! He goes on to whine that being exposed to such ideas diminishing conservative myths causes addiction, poor self esteem, devalued intimacy, increasing divorce rates, unprotected sex among young people and poor well-being. I would argue instead that insisting that a person’s worth is measured by the presence of a hymen, or that non-heterosexual desires make you a bad person, is far more damaging to people’s well-being.

Another thing that bugs me is that borders aren’t magic. Minnesota is generally progressive, but that’s largely thanks to the urban population on the east side of the state. I live in far western Minnesota, practically next door to the Dakotas, and I suspect the general sentiment of the rural population here is far more sympathetic to the North Dakota frame of mind. It makes me much less inclined to associate with many of the townies, and deepens the town-gown divide around here. It’s hard to get to know your non-university neighbors when you’re afraid of turning up that Dakota flavor of bigotry and ignorance.

Stock up on boxes!

My brother and I, as kids, were once stopped by the police and told we could go to jail because we’d found a couple of large cardboard boxes and were rolling around in them, crashing into each other. Refrigerator boxes were the best! We sheepishly ended our fun and took our boxes to a nearby dumpster. We should have told them we were training to combat the Skynet takeover (although, this was before the Terminator movie, and would only have been appreciated if they understood we were also time travelers from the future.)

But I’m serious. Large cardboard boxes, or possibly a pine tree, are all we need to defeat the rogue AIs, as explained in this book.

When this thing shows up at your door, you better have a cardboard box handy, or you’re going to have to turn a lot of somersaults.

It’ll be great when they work out the quirks in AI

For instance, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences has a problem: their articles are too obviously fake.

Some titles of the farkakte research: “Simulation of sea surface temperature based on non-sampling error and psychological intervention of music education”; “Distribution of earthquake activity in mountain area based on embedded system and physical fitness detection of basketball”; “The stability of rainfall conditions based on sensor networks and the effect of psychological intervention for patients with urban anxiety disorder.” A complete list of the retracted papers can be found here.

They read a bit like a college student throwing around big words to cover up a lack of understanding. Though purportedly written by humans, the content of each paper definitely reads as if it were put together by a computer that doesn’t quite grasp speech patterns or grammar. The papers are filled with redundancies and generally lack logic.

Right away, I noticed a problem: they should have used the more formal German “verkakte” rather than the alternative Yiddish spelling. Oh, right, and the paper titles are absurd, too.

I see two sources of problems: institutions that demand frequent publications, even where it isn’t warranted, and extremely lazy journal editors who rubberstamp everything.

As amusing (or alarming) as the idea of earthquakes being connected to basketball might be, the screwup highlights issues in science publishing that let farcical research slip into the realm of real work. As highlighted by the Chronicle of Higher Education in August, when the 400-odd papers in the geosciences journal got expressions of concern attached to them, many suspicious papers appear to have been written by scholars affiliated with Chinese institutions, where researchers are incentivized (sometimes financially) to publish in notable journals and where many doctoral students must publish a paper before graduation. The founder and editor-in-chief of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences told the Chronicle at the time that he reads every paper published in the journal each month (which would mean about 10 papers per day, including weekends), and that he thinks the fabricated research got into the journal through hacking.

Sure. Abdullah M. Al-Amri, editor-in-chief of the journal, reads every submission, and all those ridiculous papers must have been hacked into place. He reads every article, except he never takes a look at the journal once it’s been published. And he never reads the correspondence from legit researchers who point out the kind of crap getting splattered all over the pages. He just failed to notice that “Structure of plain granular rock mass based on motion sensor and movement evaluation of dancers” got published.

Just wait until Chinese researchers discover ChatGPT. We desperately need our pseudoscientific garbage to be more readable.

The stark truth

There I was yesterday, teaching, and one of the first things I told my students was that the pandemic was not over, we all ought to be wearing masks and social distancing, but that the university had decided not to enforce any precautions, and I couldn’t do anything to make them do anything even as simple as wearing a mask. The best I could do is offer to teach the class synchronously over Zoom. Of course I was wearing a mask. I might have been the only person in the building doing so. I know none of the students were. I can’t blame them, since everything from the president of the US to local campus policy is telling them the pandemic is over.

It’s not.

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

That last question is a good one. Who is worrying about power?

One good place to check is the World Economic Forum in Davos, where all the richest and most influential people in the world converge every year to talk about controlling the masses. Are they concerned about dying of COVID? Do they have plans to protect themselves from the virus? They sure do.

The first thing attendees get is a rapid COVID test and an electronic badge. The badge is linked to a conference database that controls a little light that only activates if you pass the test. You will not be admitted to the meeting unless your badge indicates that you’ve taken the daily test and are free of the disease.

Tests are free. Masks are free. The staff are required to wear them, but the rich people are not.

Inside the annual meeting’s venues, areas will be cleaned, disinfected, and ventilated several times a day. Additional state-of-the-art ventilation systems have been installed in areas with restricted air circulation. Hand sanitizers will be widely available throughout the meeting venues.

Similar precautions have been taken in the offices and factories of attendees, to protect the workers. Ha ha, fooled you, of course they’re not expected to do that. That would cost money.

Do the richest people in the world know something you don’t? They certainly do, because they’ve been investing a lot of effort in keeping you ignorant and confused. Otherwise, we might demand unthinkable things like improved air circulation in our classrooms and labs, and a routine testing policy, and required masking with good masks provided by the university (to be fair, the university did provide N95 masks to the faculty last year. We got 3. Just 3.)

Do you realize that you’re an exploited peon yet?

Politics is for the kids who never grew out of high school

I may be old, but I still remember high school. Do you? The cliques, the drama, the petty squabbles, the abusive Mean Girls and jocks? It’s all coming back.

The Republican party supported Herschel Walker because he was a football player, never mind that he was as dumb as a post, and Oz, because he was rich.

They’re handing committee memberships to George Santos, despite the fact that he’s a constitutive liar who cheated his way into office.

It’s clear that the Republicans are the Superficials, the in-group of people who strive to look glossy and fashionable, no matter how dull their minds are. What clinched my recognition that we’re back in high school is that Boebert and Greene are bickering.

The crest of the battle was played out on Jan. 7 in the speaker’s lobby ladies’ room, The Daily Beast reports, when a source says, “Greene questioned Boebert’s loyalty to McCarthy.”

Another source reportedly said that Greene asked Boebert, “You were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?”

Unaware Boebert was in the bathroom when she emerged from the stall, the first source told The Daily Beast that Lauren said to Greene, “Don’t be ugly,” and then “ran out like a little schoolgirl.”

Fighting in the girls’ room. Oh, grow up.

What’s particularly appalling is that Jacinda Ardern is resigning from her position as prime minister of New Zealand. What a contrast.

Ardern won praise for her calm stewardship of the Pacific nation through a number of major events, including the coronavirus pandemic, a volcanic eruption and the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack. She spearheaded legislation to ban military-style semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles just six days after the attack, in which more than 50 people were killed.

Can you imagine a Boebert or a Greene in a similar position? Oh hell no.

I want a transfer to that other high school on the far side of the Pacific Ocean.

If it’s on a list, it must be true

And the longer the list, the truer it must be! This gentleman has compiled a list of all the things “women” do not have, and while it starts out reflecting generic gender critical falsehoods, it gets weirder and weirder.

Whoa. Women don’t have muscle mass or lung capacity or hemoglobin? No bones? No hands? What kind of list is this?

Then I realized this person hasn’t actually ever met a woman, and is instead describing a jellyfish. He’s also probably resentful because the jellyfish spurned his romantic advances.

More males!

I mentioned yesterday that I had hit a roadblock: my spider colony was reduced to nearly all females! Those dang feminists have taken over everything.

Some good news today, though. My student’s set of breeding spiders included two more males, so I’m now up to four studs I can rotate around. This is an interesting observation, actually, that males kept in solitary are far more likely to die. These additional males had been sharing cages with females for the last month and a half, where they’d been thriving in connubial bliss. I guess this isn’t surprising, since mature males tend to be much more active, scampering about the landscape looking for mates, so confining them to a convenient container is almost certainly more stressful for them.

Today’s mating efforts were not visibly successful. The males were tentative, but did approach the females, and began with gentle stroking of the ladies abdomens, and the females did respond with a typical butt-waggle, but nothing went further while I was watching. I’ve given them some privacy now, I hope they’ll successfully mate overnight…because tomorrow the males have a date scheduled with a different female.

They also looked a bit worn-out today — I hope that’s a good sign.

Highways are already scary, self-driving cars won’t help

An amusing anecdote: an engineer is out with the family of a man she was dating, and the father tried to turn on the full self-driving option of his Tesla, so she’s practically clawing her way out of the car.

But on the way back his dad started asking me “you work on self driving cars, yeah?” (I do, I’m a systems engineer and have job hopped between a handful of autonomy companies.)

He started asking me how I liked his Tesla and I joked “just fine as long as you’re the one driving it!” And he asked me what I thought about FSD which he’d just bought. He asked if he should turn it on. I said “not with me in the car” and he then laughed and asked how I was still so scared when I work with this stuff everyday.

I was like “Uhh it’s because I…” But stopped when he pulled over and literally started turning it on. I was like “I’m not kidding, let me out of the car if you’re gonna do this” and my boyfriend’s dad and brother started laughing at me, and my boyfriend still wasn’t saying anything.

His dad was like “It’ll be fine” and I reached over my boyfriend’s little brother and tried the door handle which was locked. I was getting mad, and probably moreso because I was tipsy, and I yelled at him “Let me the fuck out”

She’s a systems engineer who works on these self-driving cars, and she wants nothing to do with it? Does she know something the rest of us don’t?

Apparently, she does. Tesla has been faking demos of its self-driving cars, which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone following Elon Musk’s hype parade.

A 2016 video that Tesla (TSLA.O) used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.

The video, which remains archived on Tesla’s website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by Chief Executive Elon Musk as evidence that “Tesla drives itself.”

But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple (AAPL.O) engineer.

It’s OK, though, because they were trying to show what was possible, rather than what the car could actually do, even if Musk was claiming the car was driving itself.

“The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,” Elluswamy said, according to a transcript of his testimony seen by Reuters.

Like, the idea of cars driving themselves and bypassing the fallibility of human drivers sounds nice, but it’s clear that the car’s software can be even more stupid and flawed than people. I wouldn’t want to share the road with these things, let alone be in a car controlled by some engineering gadget.

You know what I think would be far more useful? Software that detected when the driver was significantly impaired. You’re weaving all over the road, or you’re exceeding the speed limit, or it senses that you’re nodding off, and it fires off alarms to let you know you’re not safe, and if you exceed a certain frequency of warnings, it transmits alerts to the police. That would be a smart car, making sure that the driving software in the human’s head was operating adequately.

Knowing humans, though, there’d be a huge aftermarket in mechanics ripping out the safety measures.

When politicians interfere in health care…

Oh boy, the “partial birth abortion ban” people have moved into the Minnesota legislature, and are trying to ban abortion by inventing fictitious medical procedures and lying about them. Here’s Bill Lieske, a newly installed Republican legislator, trying to make his mark by being a dumbass.

We have born-alive individuals, and we must protect the born-alive. In this case, a partial birth abortion, the child is, in part, born alive.

The women on the committee who spoke out against the nonsensical amendment Lieske proposed were exactly right: politicians should not be practicing health care. They also point out that the amendment is about a non-existent medical procedure — it’s just grandstanding by a baby conservative.

The term “partial birth” is a misnomer.

But “partial-birth” is not a medical term. It’s a political one, and a highly confusing one at that, with both sides disagreeing even on how many procedures take place, at what point in pregnancy, and exactly which procedures the law actually bans.

The confusion is the point. They want you to think all abortions are about murdering babies, when they’re actually about saving the lives of women. All you have to do is look at the source of the term.

The term was first coined by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) in 1995 to describe a recently introduced medical procedure to remove fetuses from the womb. Alternately known as “dilation and extraction,” or D&X, and “intact D&E,” it involves removing the fetus intact by dilating a pregnant woman’s cervix, then pulling the entire body out through the birth canal.

There’s a reason for this procedure, and it’s entirely about minimizing harm to the woman. That’s not a factor in Republican thinking.

The further along a pregnancy is, the more complicated — and the more controversial — the procedures are for aborting it. Abortions performed after the 20th week of pregnancy typically require that the fetus be dismembered inside the womb so it can be removed without damaging the pregnant woman’s cervix. Some gynecologists consider such methods, known as “dilation and evacuation,” less than ideal because they can involve substantial blood loss and may increase the risk of lacerating the cervix, potentially undermining the woman’s ability to bear children in the future.

Two abortion physicians, one in Ohio and one in California, independently developed variations on the method by extracting the fetus intact. The Ohio physician, Martin Haskell, called his method “dilation and extraction,” or D&X. It involved dilating the woman’s cervix, then pulling the fetus through it feet first until only the head remained inside. Using scissors or another sharp instrument, the head was then punctured, and the skull compressed, so it, too, could fit through the dilated cervix.

Haskell has said that he devised his D&X procedure because he wanted to find a way to perform second-trimester abortions without an overnight hospital stay, because local hospitals did not permit most abortions after 18 weeks.

Now Lieske is probably going to defend his meddling in women’s health by claiming that he is a doctor. After all, all of his campaign ads announced that he was “Dr. Bill Lieske” over and over. What he doesn’t emphasize is…

He’s a chiropractor.

Also, he has an ugly haircut.