I feel a bit cthulhu-esque

I was sitting at my computer this morning, when a fuzzy, tiny blob slowly lowered itself before my face. I looked closely at it, and it was a single strand of spider silk with a dead mosquito at the end of it. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but it was too small and close. Here it is, anyway.

Now it’s possible that some ceiling spider was fishing for humans, but I prefer to think that it was a spider cult offering a sacrifice to their god. I couldn’t hear what they were chanting, so I don’t know if they were praying for anything, and I prefer to think they were just expressing their gratitude.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages

I used to see this fake graph all over the place in my New Atheist days. It’s troubling because…well, look at the Y axis. No units? How do you quantify “scientific advancement” to a single dimension, anyway? Also that dashed line extrapolation implies that science naturally rises ‘upwards’. “Christian” Dark Ages implies that there was one single unitary factor to the social, economic, and military changes that occurred after the fall of Rome, and that there was no technological progress between 300CE and 1300CE. It’s a bad graph.

How about this one?

Now that’s a quantitative historical trauma! And we get to live through it (I hope we live through it.)

Trump is going to cut NASA’s budget in half, while making some contradictory plans.

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors. The plans, released today, call for a “leaner” agency that will land “the first human ever, an American, on Mars.” But they would effectively end NASA’s long-standing role as the world leader in space science, researchers say—if the U.S. Congress follows through on them.

Putting an American on Mars is the dumbest goal ever. It’s not going to happen without a solid foundation in space science, which he is destroying. This sounds like a Musk plan: stupid, ill-founded, and doomed to failure.

Trump is demolishing biomedical research.

The Trump administration and Congress are eliminating billions of dollars of funding for medical research while also gutting the scientific workforce. Specifically, they are:

  • Terminating more than $2.4 billion in active grants and obstructing new awards.
  • Radically altering budget structures and reducing future funding.
  • Eroding expertise and ending training programs.

Our best working estimates calculate that the NIH alone has cancelled more than 1,500 grants so far, representing a loss of more than $2.4 billion (PDF) in previously-committed medical research funding, with more expected. When delays (an additional $2.3 billion) are factored in, the total value of lost research funding approaches $5 billion.

The changes to grants management have been rapid, large-scale, and chaotic. In the past, grant terminations have typically been associated with misconduct and extraordinarily rare: from 2012 to 2024, there were fewer than five such terminations. Since February, however, hundreds of researchers across the country have received termination letters telling them that their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This specific phrase references an obscure update to the Office of Management and Budget rules from the first Trump administration that allows them to unilaterally sever grants in service of the president’s political agenda. This executive branch maneuver is called “impoundment” and it functionally overrides Congressional authorization and appropriation.

Some of the terminations are blatantly ideological; a result of DOGE-directed screening and searches for flagged keywords like “women,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” “diversity,” or “COVID.” The attack on “woke DEI ideology” targets research focused on HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, addiction and mental health, health equity and systemic racial disparities, and more. Other terminations have nothing to do with the subject of the research, and instead must be understood as part of the administration’s attempt to strip universities of their independence.

Here’s a tally of many of the scientific budget cuts.

• National Science Foundation (NSF):
o The budget proposes $3.9 billion for NSF, which is $4.9 billion below (55%
decrease) FY 2025 enacted. The budget request proposes cuts for climate, clean
energy, “woke social, behavioral and economic sciences” and “programs in low
priority areas of science.”
• National Institutes of Health (NIH):
o The budget proposes $29.116 billion for the NIH, a $17.97 billion reduction (38%
decrease) from FY 2025 enacted. It also proposes reforms to the NIH, including
consolidating programs into five new focus areas:
▪ National Institute on Body Systems Research;
▪ National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research;
▪ National Institute of General Medical Sciences;
▪ National Institute of Disability Related Research; and
▪ National Institute on Behavioral Health.
o NIH research would align with the president’s priorities to address chronic
disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating
research on climate change, radical gender ideology and divisive “racialism”.
This new structure retains the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health
(ARPA-H).
o The budget provides $27 billion for NIH research.
• Department of Energy (DOE):
o The budget proposes $7.092 billion for the Office of Science, which is $1.148
billion below (13.9% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $888 million for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
(EERE), which is $2.572 billion below (74% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $200 million for Advanced Research Projects Agency–
Energy (ARPA-E), which is $260 million below (56% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
o The budget proposes a $1.311 billion decrease for the NOAA Operations,
Research and Grants program. Since the final FY 2025 continuing resolution did
not provide the specific funding level, the base level is unknown. The budget
cites a termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant
programs, which are not aligned with the Administration’s policy-ending ‘Green
New Deal’ initiatives.”
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):
o The budget proposes $5.069 billion for NASA Science Mission Directorate, which
is $2.265 billion below (30.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $1.034 billion for Earth Science, which is $1.161 billion
below (52.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $569 million for the Space Technology Directorate, which
is $531 million below (48.2% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.

Don’t forget: 47% decrease in the budget of the department of agriculture, and a 30% cut to the department of the interior, and eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science! On the bright side, the defense department gets a 13% increase. Also keep in mind that these are the quantitative changes — we haven’t even started examining the qualitative changes in where the money that is left is going, thanks to agents of chaos like RFK jr and Bhattacharya.

There’s no hiding the fact that these cuts are ideologically driven.

In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — began an ideological purge of its grants. Without warning, hundreds of research projects — many of which had been underway for years, representing thousands of hours of work and billions of dollars in investment — were abruptly cancelled without a scientifically valid explanation. The NIH cited only vague connections to “gender identity” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), or other now-forbidden topics such as vaccine hesitancy and COVID, as justification, claiming these projects no longer aligned with “agency priorities.”

These funding cuts raise serious ethical concerns for study participants and risk many life-saving findings going unpublished. The NIH has undermined research on life-threatening diseases that affect us all like cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer’s — and dangerously implies that some patients are more worthy of care than others. These actions stifle scientific progress and put lives at risk.

It’s amazing how electing one man can so profoundly change the course of history…and not in a good way. Here’s the real march of progress:

Jeffrey Tomkins strikes again!

Any time the various creationist organizations — AiG, ICR, CMI, DI, etc. — start getting excited and claiming that genetics supports creationism, it usually seems to trace back to Jeffrey Tomkins, the one guy who knows a little genetics and molecular biology, and most importantly, knows how to distort the scientific literature. A new paper in Nature, the complete sequencing of ape genomes, does a detailed and thorough comparison of great ape genomic data, and Tomkins does his usual thing and butchers it.

Tomkins is known for his usage of “ungapped” comparisons to depress the percentage similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. This method relies on aligning the beginnings of two DNA sequences, and measuring whether subsequent base pairs at corresponding positions match one another. The flaw in this method is that insertions, duplications or deletions in either sequence may cause parts of it to be shifted forward or backward relative to the other, so that equivalent sets of base pairs are not precisely aligned with one another in the comparison. Ungapped comparisons interpret those parts of the two sequences as entirely mismatched even if there are no other differences between them.

If you see any creationist now claiming that humans and chimpanzees are 15% different, rather than the number reported in scientific journals of 1.5%, it’s all coming from the mangled misinterpretations of Tomkins, who really is obsessed with the idea that humans can’t possibly be at all related to other apes. Casey Luskin accepts the distortion and is stating that scientists have been hiding the magnitude of the differences.

They haven’t. The root of the problem is that there are multiple ways to compare sequences of 3 billion nucleotides. One way is to compare aligned sequences, that is, the genes and regulatory stuff that makes up the functional bits of the genome, and there you find about 98.5% similarity between chimps and humans. Another approach is to tally up all of the sequence differences, whether they have any phenotype or not, and there you can find all kinds of repetitive, noisy stuff in the genome. You can find that a human parent is 10% different from their own child! Here’s a good explanation of the whole data set, rather than a Tompkins-ish cherry-picked mess of lies.

Not mentioned, unfortunately, is the ultimate key to explaining these differences: the differences are in the genetic junk. I guess it’s fair to not bring that up, since creationists do not believe in that anyway.

It does expose the fact that ultimately, all the creationist organizations, including the Intelligent Design wackos at the Discovery Institute, do believe that humans were separately created by a deity/aliens. If that wasn’t their endgame they wouldn’t be paying any attention to Tomkins’ nonsense.

I can’t let this pass. Casey Luskin is particularly egregious in claiming that scientists are lying.

These are all groundbreaking findings — and it’s a shame that Nature would not report the data clearly and would make all of this so hard to find — using jargon that most non-experts won’t understand. Why did they do this? It’s important to realize that publishing scientific papers can be a bit like sausage-making: it’s often messy, and the final form that you read usually represents compromise language that all of the authors, reviewers, and editors were willing to publish — and may not represent precisely how every author of a paper feels. So perhaps some authors of this study would have preferred to state the implications more plainly. But we can still ask, Why didn’t Nature state the results clearly and let the chips fall where they may?

Note that this is a response to Nature publishing the complete and detailed results of a complex genetic comparison — they did state the results clearly, and published all of the data. None of the creationist critics have added any new information, every complaint they’ve made is the product of extracting bits and pieces from the Nature paper. It’s not their fault that the paper doesn’t state the implications more plainly because the creationist implications are not there.

It annoys the hell out of me that Nature can publish a 28 page paper with 82 tables of data in the supplementary information, and Luskin can whine that they didn’t dumb it down enough that a lying creationist can find the part where real scientists say god did it.

It’s because the data don’t support your claim, you ass.

The children are squabbling

Musk is on his way out, but he’s not going quietly. It seems there’s been some resentful scuffling over his activities failures.

A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder’s quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.

The incident was previously reported as a “screaming match” between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.

“‘Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” Bannon recounted. “And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him. It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.”

The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.

The Daily Mail is not a reliable source, but we also have physical evidence of the fight.

Cool, hit him some more, and put a little more vinegar in the punch.

You know what? This is not normal.

Spartan Mosquito Pro — save your money

It’s that time of year when we start spending more time outdoors, and when the mosquitos are on the prowl for your blood. Colin Purrington bought these simple devices that are non-toxic but promise to kill mosquitos around your yard — not that I’m at all interested, I like having spider food living around my home — but I can understand not wanting biting, flying insects disturbing your parties. It also seems ecologically safe, since all it is is a tube containing a yeast solution (to produce CO2, a mosquito attractant) and boric acid, to kill insects that drink from it.

Only problem is that they don’t work. They produce very little CO2, mosquitos don’t take the bait, and if they crawl inside the tube, they don’t drink, they just fly out again. And it’ll cost you $50 for a box of 4 tubes! They really shouldn’t have let these devices fall into the hands of a scientist who can think quantitatively and who can devise easy tests of their efficacy.

Oh, another little problem with Spartan Pro: if you write a negative review of their product, they will sue you. It’s a stupid SLAPP suit that was eventually defeated, at a cost of $90,000 to Purrington. No, he didn’t get his legal costs back.

SLAPP suits are evil, and anyone or any compony that deploys them is evil, too.

I’m amazed at all the people leaving comments on Purrington’s site to claim that they actually do work. I don’t know whether they’re gullible, or Spartan Mosquito is paying puppets to leave phony testimonials, or my most charitable interpretation, they’re seeing the effects of general insect decline and attributing it to the magic cylinder they hung from a tree. I’m seeing fewer insects year by year in my area, so this might be a good time to be selling ineffective insect traps and letting your reputation thrive on ecological decline.

Still carrying water for Musk

Here’s a nice Washington Post headline:

SpaceX has a partially successful test flight

The subhead tells the real story.

SpaceX successfully launched its Starship on May 27, but the rocket lost control mid-flight and eventually fell apart.

They failed to recover the reusable booster, which exploded, and the second stage was tumbling out of control, and exploded. SUCCESS!

This was the ninth Starship launch, and none of them have “succeeded” by any reasonable meaning of the word. Maybe someone needs to teach the editors at the WaPo the word “failed”? Somehow, I think they’re going to need to use that word a lot in the next few years, in lots of contexts.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of the flaws in Starship design, with Elon Musk at the top of the list of problems.

Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.

You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.

SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions. Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.

If you have even a passing knowledge of engineering, you know this is what iterative design looks like. So, why hasn’t Musk done this?

Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why?

Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; they might as well keep shoving money at the beast.

This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.

That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.

Why are Xian apologists so inane?

I don’t know the answer. This Christian dork kept popping up in my YouTube feed, making this claim that we shouldn’t take atheists seriously because there are so many great arguments for the existence of his god. I had to offer my short sweet response.

Not only are his arguments bad, but arguments are not evidence. I just had to get that off my chest.

Don’t worry about the next pandemic

There is a plan. The FBI will put together a manhunt to catch the people who cause it!

As we read and process reports of a new COVID strain emerging, | want you to know that we are actively investigating, in multiple field offices, the cover-up of the origin of the COVID virus, along with associated matters requiring our attention. You deserve answers.

Yeah, Dan Bongino. Get a crack team of G-men together, give ’em tommy guns, and send them out there to track down, and arrest or kill, the gang responsible for genetic drift. That’s how authoritarian brains work.

I suggest we call it the “Unread Journal of Stupid Ideas”

Scientific publishing has some serious problems: we’ve outsourced the publication of science to for-profit publishers, it relies on it’s ‘customers’ to do peer-review for free, it has no incentive to provide open access to the research that is largely supported by government funding. The system could use a major overhaul. However, this is not the answer.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he will ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and proposed creating an “in-house” publication by the department.

“We are probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they are all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an episode of “The Ultimate Human” podcast.

Kennedy said such publications are “vessels” for pharmaceutical companies.

The top three journals are the top three because scientists world-wide publish in them — they are popular prestige journals, and scientists prefer to publish in them because these are the sources their peers will read. They are the product of contingent historical processes, not capture by pharmaceutical companies.

Right-wingers are used to relying on billionaires buying “think-tanks” that artificially prop up their bad ideas. That would be a bad model for a scientific journal, which should be a neutral agency. RFK Jr is proposing to build a fake journal that would be under the control of the ideologues who have been appointed for political reasons.

I have questions. Why would anyone want to publish in this hypothetical journal? Why would anyone want to read it? Who’s going to pay for it? The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA have international popularity, both for submissions and subscriptions — how would a journal in the pocket of American conservatives replace that? Are they going to allow publication of data on vaccines, epidemics, trans issues, or anything that RFK Jr doesn’t like?

To be honest, I don’t read The Lancet, NEJM, or JAMA, because those are medical journals. Imagine, though, that the government announced that they were not going to allow American scientists to publish in Nature or Science because they were “vessels” for climatologists or evolutionary biologists or epidemiologists, or that they were going to create their own edited propaganda journal to block those ideas. You can deplore the flaws in those journals, but you can’t just rip them away and erect a fake journal in their place.