Who was afraid of the big bad balloon?

I just couldn’t get worked up about it. It was an elegant, efficient piece of technology, but even if it was spying on the US, I don’t know what they’d see that their satellites hadn’t already shown them.

In fact, I’m all in favor of more transparency.

In case you were worried, though, the US has popped the balloon.

U.S. fighter aircraft, acting on an order from President Biden, downed a Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, the Pentagon said, ending what senior administration officials contend was an audacious attempt by Beijing to collect intelligence on sensitive American military sites.

OK, I guess.

POP!

America is safe once again.

I think you have the wrong address

What a strange spam email.

Hey Friend,

(Resending this to make sure you saw it…)
We’re putting together a group of 12 Pastors/Church Leaders who want to GET RESULTS for a new LIVE cohort inside our FB Ads Bootcamp Coaching Program starting on Tuesday, February 7th:

Specifically, we’re looking for:

You have at least 1 hour per day to devote over the next 8-10 week to implement our proven system to land high ticket clients
You’re Kingdom minded and feel called to being a Digital Tentmaker so you can support the Church
You want more time freedom AND financial margin
You genuinely want to serve businesses and help them grow
No marketing experience needed, but you’re coachable, take action, and are willing to get out of your comfort zone

If that’s you, please hit reply to this email and I’ll send you more info and details on getting started.

We’re starting ASAP and space is limited to 12. So let us know if you’re in.

Cheers,

Jeremy & Alejandro

P.S. Yes this email is real, and yes, I will reply!

It’s kind of revealing, though, isn’t it? The message isn’t about spreading the gospel — it’s about landing high ticket clients, financial margins, and serving businesses. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that there’s some MLM scheme underlying it, too.

I didn’t reply to Jeremy & Alejandro, even though I felt like just sending them one image.

It’s funny that Jesus and an atheist can find common ground in scourging the venal profiteers in the church.

Stereotypical liberal college professor

Today I’m handing out the first exam of the semester in genetics, and some of the students are a bit anxious. I’ve been getting all these email questions about how to prepare for this exam, do I have to complete it in a set amount of time, am I allowed to talk to other people when I’m working on it, are there security things I have to do (man, high schools are warping students’ minds), etc., etc., etc. They seem discombobulated by the fact I don’t run the class like a drill sergeant, and that the exams are all open book, open notes, all this slackness you ought to expect from a liberal college professor.

So this morning I had to post a note to the class explaining that yes, it’s true, I have some rather loose and tolerant policies in my teaching. It’s OK if you work with other students on the exam, it’s not cheating, it’s called learning. What a weird thing to have to spell out!

[Read more…]

Big win for the University of Minnesota Morris

My colleagues here have earned a major award from HHMI.

The University of Minnesota Morris is one of 104 colleges and universities from throughout the U.S. that will receive a six-year grant through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence (IE3) initiative.

This grant challenges US colleges and universities to substantially and sustainably build capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences. The IE3 grants total more than $60 million over six years and are a part of HHMI’s national portfolio of experiments aimed at improving the introductory undergraduate science experience.

…

Associate Professor of Biology Heather Waye is leading the IE3 efforts at Morris, along with colleagues Rachel Johnson, Shaina Philpot, Barry McQuarrie, and Kerri Barnstuble.

“Our goal is to find the barriers that STEM students are facing and figure out how to tackle them,” Waye said. “This is an opportunity for us to change the system, not the student, so that the benefit of the grant will last beyond the scope of the grant.”

One of the first goals is to establish a Quantitative Learning Center (QLC) on campus, a dedicated space where students can build their quantitative skills with technologies used in their STEM classes. Waye stressed that student input is a key part of planning for this. In addition to providing practical help, the QLC would help students feel supported, valued and confident in their STEM abilities.

This is excellent news! All of my classes are heavy in the quantitative skills department, so having a campus initiative to get incoming students up to speed on math and stats will make my life easier, and I’m all about the easy life.

Felicia Entwhistle has the deets

She’s speaking out on Facebook about the problems with Andrew Torrez. It’s all about constant harassment, violation of boundaries, unwanted innuendo, etc. An excerpt:

Here’s what I find particularly infuriating: several well-known atheist groups were “aware of multiple instances [of harassed individuals] with Andrew and none of them have cut ties with him at this time” and also “I’ve left all these communities. I felt unsafe and frankly unwelcome. People with power to do something have done nothing.”

I’ve also abandoned so many atheist communities after seeing this behavior time after time, which has made me one of those people with no power to do anything. I’ve heard similar stories so many times, just the names change…but it’s like there’s an endless reservoir of sex pests out there who ruin everything.

Never mind the corpses, the pandemic is over!

Yesterday, I participated in a mundane committee meeting, one where we were making decisions on the distribution of in-house grant funds. It was fine, there were a fair number of really good proposals, we didn’t have to struggle over funding anyone’s work. However, at the end, someone made a comment about how we didn’t have to deal with COVID accountability anymore, and we weren’t going to have to provide extra money for COVID, because the pandemic was over.

My heart sank at that. People actually believe we beat the virus because a politician announced that we had. I’ve got news for those guys.

On Monday, the White House announced that it will let the Covid-related public health emergency declarations expire on May 11, 2023. Ashish Jha, Biden’s national Covid response coordinator, framed the announcement in true “accentuate-the-positive,” “we’re back to normal” fashion, tweeting that the emergency was being lifted because the country was “in a better place and “getting through the winter without a big surge or run on hospitals.” He even threw in the Biden administration’s favorite line: “We have the tools to manage this virus.”

Jha can tweet whatever he likes, but as I’ve said again and again, the numbers don’t lie. As Alyssa Bilinski and Kathryn Thompson from the Brown School of Public Health, along with Ezekiel Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in November: “The US continued to experience significantly higher Covid-19 and excess all-cause mortality compared with peer countries during 2021 and early 2022, a difference accounting for 150,000 to 470,000 deaths.” Last week, more people died of Covid than perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Don’t be fooled. The pandemic is not over. This is all about rolling back Medicaid coverage and little things, like not having to pay for the accommodations for COVID prevention that professors are expected to make. It’s about fostering political delusions — ‘vote for me, I ended COVID!’. It’s about unleashing the greedy fucks at pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, both Pfizer and Moderna are hiking their prices on Covid vaccines. And this isn’t a little uptick in the price tag—both Pfizer and Moderna are proposing 400 percent increases. Again, this is going to put vaccines out of the reach of many low-income uninsured Americans, dissuade others from getting the jab, and sock insured people with potential premium increases as insurance companies pass on the pain to the rest of us. The White House has issued strongly worded statements about the price hikes, but many have called for bolder action against this predatory behavior. As of now, there are crickets from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We failed to control the pandemic because the only thing we were committed to was half-assing it. The policy of neglect and denial will continue as thousands will die. They’re mostly old people, though, so who cares, and we’re all going to close our eyes and pretend long COVID isn’t a thing. We’ll just keep on riding the roller coaster.

Wheeeee!

A patchwork dodo is not a dodo

Somebody has been watching too much Jurassic Park. They should read the original novel, which was a badly written Luddite pot-boiler with a bad take on genetic technology that emphasized the horrible ways technology would inevitably go wrong (that was a tiresome theme in practically all Michael Crichton novels), while the movies just highlighted the glorious resurrection of really cool animals. I guess the latest movie has hordes of perfectly healthy, vigorous dinosaurs swarming across the American West, as if that could happen.

In yet another George Church production, his company, Colossal Biosciences, proposes to resurrect the dodo, just as he said he was going to bring back the mammoth and thylacine. He hasn’t accomplished any of it. I’ll go out on a very thick limb and say he’s never going to succeed. The procedure, using CRISPR to incrementally patch dodo genes into an extant bird species, is fundamentally flawed.

To create a dodo from such genetic information, the company plans to try to modify the bird’s closest living relative, the brightly colored Nicobar pigeon, turning it step by step into a dodo and possibly “re-wilding” the animal in its native habitat.

Colossal has not yet created any kind of animal. It’s still working on developing the necessary processes. And making a dodo might not even be possible. That’s because it is hard to predict how many DNA changes will be needed to transform the Nicobar pigeon into a big-beaked, three-foot-tall dodo.

The dodo had a full, functioning, integrated genome that evolved gradually under a regime of continual selection — every intermediate was viable. Colossal’s approach is to splice a few dodo genes into a pigeon, raise it up, splice in a few more genes, etc. Those dodo genes evolved in a dodo genome. Gene A was in a cooperative relationship with gene B in the dodo, but you’ve just popped gene A into a genome that has a very different version of pigeon gene B. The gene you want to insert might be seriously deleterious in a pigeon context, and you don’t know what the relationship is. The dodo genes might also be optimized for a completely different environment, yet you’re trying to make them viable in lab-bred animals.

It’s insane. They’re going to plunk a few ancient genes into some poor pigeon and declare victory, but all they’re going to do is produce a sad fat flightless bird that is totally maladapted for everywhere, not a dodo at all, but a weirdly warped mutant pigeon. Good luck getting Chris Pratt to herd the flock around the landscape.

At least the dodo is only three feet tall…I can’t imagine what kind of botchwork monstrosity they’re going to build out of elephant stock. And they’re talking about “rewilding” these animals! The world they were adapted to no longer exists, these mutant freaks will not be able to thrive anywhere, and it’s pure fantasy to imagine they can let some loose in some environment that doesn’t want them, where the forces that drove the original extinction still exist, and get a supportable natural population. These are not serious ideas.

But they’ve got serious money.

The two-year-old startup also said today that it had raised a further $150 million in funding (bringing the total it’s raised to $225 million)—some of which will go to a new effort around bird genomics.

How do they do that? Easy. It’s all hype. They’re building on the flashy, fictional pseudoscience plotted by Jurassic Park, with an audience of stupid rich people who are impressed by CGI and confuse it with reality. Hey, if you can sell Bitcoin, you can sell fantasy animals that don’t exist to people with too much money. They even admit it.

Colossal’s investors include the billionaire Thomas Tull, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and the prominent biotech venture capitalist Robert Nelsen. Nelsen invested in the company because de-extinction “is just really cool,” he said in an email. “Mammoths and direwolves are cool.”

Oh god. Billionaires are so fucking stupid. All this money, pouring into an absurd project, and what are they going to do with it? It’s all about profit in the minds of the people throwing cash at it.

Because there isn’t much money to be made in conservation, how Colossal will ever turn a profit is another evolving question. One Colossal executive told MIT Technology Review that the company could sell tickets to see its animals, and Lamm believes the technologies needed to create the mammoth or the dodo will have other commercial uses.

Conservation isn’t profitable, but you know what is? A $225 million freak show, with dismal mutant animals in cages. Pleistocene Park! Yeah, that’s the ticket! The concept made money in that movie and book written by a guy who hated science, so let’s try that!

I knew that venture capitalists were evil and stupid, but it’s disappointing that so many highly trained molecular biologists are being sucked into this futile endeavor by all the hypetrain money flowing into it. And George Church — he used to be a well-regarded Smart Guy, but now his reputation is going to be as an ethically-challenged PT Barnum.

Goddamnit, American Atheists

Not this again. It’s another wave of sexual harassment allegations, and big names stepping down.

Two board members of American Atheists, one of the nation’s best-known atheist advocacy organizations, resigned in the past month after ethical concerns were raised about their actions at conferences for nonbelievers.

One of them is Andrew Torrez, who I don’t know personally at all, but I have listened to his podcast, Opening Arguments. I’d heard rumors third hand, so this isn’t entirely surprising.

The other is Mandisa Thomas, and that is shocking! I’ve known her for years as an energetic leader of the Black Nonbelievers, and now, what’s worse is that there is a wave of resignations from other members of that organization. Bria Crutchfield is leaving? It’s hard to believe.

Embarrassing confession: in all my years, decades even, of atheist promotion and activism, I’ve never even been asked to serve on the board of any atheist or humanist organization. Not even so much as a tentative enquiry. I used to think it might have been that I was too controversial, but now I’m wondering…maybe I’m too boring? Too homely? Too unreliable? Too anti-Dawkins?

Anyway, if American Atheists (or other godless organization) would like to recruit a staid old atheist who is also incredibly unsexy (but also fundamentally monogamous), I’m available. I feel sad about saying this, but maybe I’ve been the uncontroversial atheist all along.

Why the John Birch Society is evil

One of my unfortunately vivid memories of my childhood was encountering my second cousin, Henry, who was a fanatical John Bircher. He hated the UN, communists, public schools, and non-white people. He was also cheerful, outgoing, and enthusiastic, the life of the party, and he was often at family events. He was at my father’s funeral, telling stories about Dad. I avoided him. Wanted nothing to do with him.

What I remember was Henry learning that I was into science…so he helpfully gave me all this John Birch literature about how black people were more closely related to gorillas than white people were. Even at that young age (I must have been 10 or 12), I knew this was insane nonsense, a lie driven by naked racism, and I knew right away that Henry was a bad man to be avoided. More generally, I learned early to despise the John Birch Society.

Hmm. Why have I also learned to hate Fox News? Because it is the modern form of the John Birch Society, as this video explains. The connections are undeniable.

Oh man. The comments about anti-communist paranoia just brought the bad memories flooding back. Deranged conservative relatives are just the worst — you have to hang with them and listen to their noise while hating every word. I’m just relieved he was a somewhat distant relative and only had to see him sporadically. Maybe he was like a low-dose vaccine?