This morning was my yearly checkup, and I’m afraid everything was normal. Cholesterol was down, blood pressure 120/70, not a hint of prostate cancer, probably going to live for a little while longer.
There was some funny business with my thyroid, so I have to go in next week for an ultrasound. Also I get to get another colonoscopy in the summer of 2024.
I’m home briefly, but I have to go teach a new class. Oh boy. And then I’m coming home again to cook for a potluck this evening.
So many spiders, and with many more to come. They’re keeping me busy!
We all knew William Shockley was a disgusting racist, using bad biology to argue for bad goals, but he was the co-inventor of the transistor! He won a Nobel prize for his work in a field unrelated to biology! So while my friends and I were willingly calling him out as a fraud, a liar, and a racist while we were out for beers, all the major scientific publications were more mealy-mouthed and ingratiating, which was annoying. It was partly out of misplaced politeness, but also that a lot of the white male old guard were probably sympathetic to his ideas.
Maybe that’s changing. Science has published an editorial apologizing for their past indifference/support for Shockley, and promising to do better. They’re calling out the racists and phonies.
Shockley was part of a cadre of physicists who advanced ideas outside of their area of expertise to promote a right-wing agenda. He was a close friend of Frederick Seitz—president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University—who, following a career in physics, became a purveyor of misinformation on tobacco, nuclear weapons, and climate change. Like Shockley, Seitz carried out his nonphysics work through op-eds and conservative think tanks, not through the accepted mechanism of peer review that he used in doing physics. Seitz was not, at least publicly, as overtly in favor of eugenics as was Shockley, but he was a strong advocate for genetic determinism, even claiming at the behest of the cigarette industry that tobacco itself was not harmful because genetics determined whether smokers would ultimately contract lung cancer.
Sound familiar? There are many ‘scientists’ getting checks from right-wing think tanks right now, although most of them are now busy with careers in vaccine and climate change denialism. The words have changed but the song is much the same. Let’s see Science start calling out more of the living hucksters and propagandists for the far right. But for now, I’m reasonably happy with their apology for propping up a dead one.
Following Shockley’s death in 1989, Nature correctly called out his racism in an obituary, but then published a letter from Seitz defending Shockley and claiming that the reason Shockley became a eugenicist was because of physical trauma he experienced in a near-fatal car accident. When Science wrote about this dustup, it referred to Shockley’s ideas as merely “unpopular” and “extremely controversial.” It then ran a letter from an even more notorious eugenicist, J. Philippe Rushton, who argued that by merely covering the disagreement at Nature, Science was delivering an “ad hominem attack.” In addition to an ill-advised decision to publish Rushton’s letter, Science posted a response saying, “no criticism of Shockley was intended.” Yikes.
Looking back, it’s clear that what was intended as an attempt to make room for dissent and discussion only served to abet Shockley and his cohorts in their effort to build support for eugenics. Science gave them a platform and inadequate scorn. The lesson is that we at Science need to make more effort to think about everything that we do, not only from the standpoint of communicating science to the public, but also as an organization that above all, supports all of humanity. The process of science is one of continual revision, but it’s also one that must have a conscience.
It was only a few months ago, in a commentary on racism in science by Ebony Omotola McGee, that Shockley was described in our pages in the terms he deserved. But as recently as 2001, Science described him simply as a “transistor inventor and race theorist.” That won’t cut it anymore. As of today, a link to this editorial will appear along with any mention of Shockley in this journal.
Make no mistake. Shockley was a racist. Shockley was a eugenicist. That’s all.
That’s a pretty good apology: admitting the mistake, taking the blame for it, and planning an action to correct their error. Not that it will stop all the modern ‘race realists’ from relying on old boobs like Shockley and Rushton in their arguments.
The true reason I pursued evolutionary biology:
Although, to be accurate, I didn’t see it until I was in middle school, and it was so obviously bad that if I had any reason to get into evolution it was to debunk it.
Still, Raquel Welch was magnificent. RIP.
We had an abrupt drop in temperature last night, along with some snow and 80kph winds. It was a blizzard! Howling all night long!
This morning, I get up and see the snow drifts everywhere.
I think that’s elegant and beautiful. For a sense of scale, though, that’s just my driveway, and the drift is about knee deep.
I also liked this snow sculpture.
The wind just carved a thin straight line of snow from the signpost. There are these interesting shapes all over the place.
Not so interesting, though, was walking to work through the knee-deep drifts.
One podcast I listen to fairly regularly is “The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal,” and the latest episode was weirdly reassuring. It was a reminiscence about the state of blogging in Ye Olde Days, you know, the early 2000s-2010s. It reminded me of how horribly awful the political landscape was then, and of all the faux liberals who dominated the networks and newspapers. It’s still the same old problem — the NY Times is not a progressive newspaper at all, in case you hadn’t noticed — but it was so much worse back then. Chris Matthews was considered left wing! The Dixie Chicks got canceled! David Brooks was given a sinecure at the NY Times! Ann Coulter was featured on MSNBC!
Political media is still generally abominable, but this podcast made me aware that maybe there has been some slight progress. I’ll excuse it for making me feel old.
This is also what I think of chatGPT.
I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like “how to interact with ChatGPT” is a useful classroom skill. It’s not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn’t have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it’s not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It’s a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you’re a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.
“Oh, but it’s a source of inspiration!”
So, you’ve never been to a writers’ workshop, spent 30 minutes with the staff on the school literary magazine, seen the original “You’re the man now, dog!” scene, or had any other exposure to the thousand and one gimmicks invented over the centuries to get people to put one word after another.
“It provides examples for teaching the art of critique!”
Why not teach with examples, just hear me out here, by actual humans?
“Students can learn to write by rewriting the output!”
Am I the only one who finds passing off an edit of an unattributable mishmash as one’s own work to be, well, flagrantly unethical?
“You’re just yelling at a cloud! What’s next, calling for us to reject modernity and embrace tradition?”
I’d rather we built our future using the best parts of our present rather than the worst.
I’m going to call it a bullshit fountain from now on.
Crisis! Emergency! Elon Musk discovered a terrible injustice!
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
I’ve never really worried about this before, but my tweets make less of a splash than Joe Biden’s. I would have thought this was no big deal — he’s the president, I’m some schmoe in Minnesota — but now that you mention it, that is unfair. People should pay more attention to me! So far, all I’m able to do is lie on the floor and kick and scream and cry about it, but Elon has control. He has engineers. He can hack the code.
That’s what he did. He told his engineers to cheat and artificially inflate his numbers.
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”
That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.
Keep that in mind when Musk brags about how important he is, based on “engagement” and “followers” and “traffic”. He’s cheating big time at this game.
Here’s a good thing to remember: Elon Musk is just dumb.
The Michigan State University shooting has our university officials concerned. I’ve been getting multiple emails from them telling us what to do if it happens here, which could very well occur, and that’s the first time that’s happened. This country has shootings every day, and finally, someone in the administration calls attention to our situation. We’re an openly liberal institution promoting liberal values — we’ve faced protests from outside because we support gay and trans students, for instance — and we’re imbedded deep in red state/Trump country. All it takes is one maladjusted hater to grab his gun and decide hunting season has opened on campus.
Unfortunately, the only advice I’ve seen is a link to this university page, with the advice to RUN-HIDE-FIGHT. Oh, yeah? Like I never would have thought of that. It is basically telling us the obvious, that we’re on our own and are desperately helpless.
I take that back. There are bits I wouldn’t have considered, like, when running, “Keep your hands visible.” Why? Oh, right, the other thing they tell us is that the campus police are around. We wouldn’t want to be shot by a cop while running away! Also:
How to React When Law Enforcement Arrives
Remain calm; follow officers’ instructionsKeep your hands up and out in front of you, assuring your hand are empty
Keep hands visible at all times
Avoid making quick movements towards officers such as attempting to hold on to them for safety
Avoid pointing, screaming and/or yelling
Move quickly towards the nearest exit or where directed to by police
Do not stop to ask officers for help or directions when evacuating
OBEY. DO NOT STARTLE THE POLICE. I guess that’s important advice. It’s the lengthiest section of the page.
Really, this advice is nothing but “try not to get shot by the shooter or police,” and none of it is particularly useful. When dealing with an active shooter, we should be thinking about active prevention, like with tighter gun laws. Instead of endangering the innocent, maybe the police ought to be confiscating guns from dangerous people, before the shooting starts. The Michigan State murderer had been found to have mental health issues, and had been arrested on a felony weapons charge…and the justice system had done nothing, letting him walk away armed. It’s time to end that.
I’m tired of seeing scenes like this.
At least one Michigan state representative has the right idea.
You may not want to read it, but if you’re feeling particularly cynical, this Twitter thread about romantic nature is refreshing. Lots of necrophilia, though, and it’s sad to learn that those monogamous swans cheat.
