Biologists aren’t funny

Also, we’re going to nit-pick all your jokes and tell you why this one is stupid.

So you might as well stop trying. In a study, some critics found that biologists are duds at getting a laugh.

Everyone knows that a good joke can liven up a talk. Sadly, however, good jokes are in
short supply — at least according to a survey of more than 500 presentations at biology meetings.

Two-thirds of the attempts at humour during these talks fell flat, drawing either polite chuckles or no laughter at all. Almost one-quarter of attempted jokes were judged as a “moderate success”, eliciting audible laughter from around half the audience. Only 9% prompted most or all of the attendees to laugh enthusiastically. In fairness, 42% of jests were spontaneous remarks relating to glitches in presentations, such as slide malfunctions, that were not intended to bring down the house. And audiences might not have expected jokes, making it harder to get them to laugh.

Roughly 40% of the talks monitored were humourless, eliminating the risk of failed jokes, but probably raising the risk of bored listeners. The work is published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Just biologists? OK, now I want to see some comparative studies. Who’s funnier, biologists, chemists, or physicists? What about mathematicians? Or, dare I say it, philosophers? I want to see some competition here, because my experience has been that biologists are much funnier than all those other disciplines…possibly because I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Possibly because we all know that bodily functions and sex are a much richer playground for jokes.

If you want a real snooze, listen to business people trying to make a speech. There’s usually some kind of tired old joke from a tired old joke book to break the ice, and then a lot of dreary numbers and ‘inspirational’ anecdotes.

They do provide some suggestions for adding humor.

Top tips for making jokes during a conference presentation, according to Victoria Stout, who
works in student support at Sacramento City College and is also a comedy performer.
• Authenticity is key. But if you’re super-sarcastic and mean, that’s not going to be appropriate.
• Use humour to connect with the audience, not to isolate them.
• Scientists respond well to puns. They also like analogies.
• People relax with a joke attempt. That primes the way for successful jokes later.
• Scientists have had incredibly interesting lives, and humour comes from the reality of our lived experience. Therefore, you are funny.

All that is mostly fair. “Scientists respond well to puns” sounds a little bit like an insult. “Scientists have had incredibly interesting lives” sounds like she doesn’t know very many scientists. I spend way too much time peering into dark corners looking for arthropods to be called “interesting,” and all you have to do is ask my wife or kids to learn that I am one of the most boring people on the planet.

Republican landlord abuses tenants and spiders

This is somewhat old news: I’ve mentioned before this strange entitled woman who has been harassing tenants, specifically by throwing tarantulas at them, but now at last she has been found guilty in the courts of the crime.

A jury on Friday found Marisa Simonetti, 32, guilty of one count each of domestic assault, harassment and disorderly conduct, all misdemeanors.

According to the criminal complaint, an individual had been renting out the basement of Simonetti’s Edina, Minnesota, home through Airbnb in June 2024. They reported to police that “everything had been fine” until she requested that pest control be hired due to “a lot of large spiders in the basement.”

Simonetti started insulting and calling the individual names after they made the request, the complaint said.

OK, Ms Tenant, spiders are perfectly normal inhabitants of basement apartments, and this being Minnesota, there are few risks associated with our local species. Learn to appreciate them.

That said, there is no excuse for her landlady’s abusive behavior in response.

During the night of June 20, 2024, police responded to the home after Simonetti “intercepted” groceries ordered by the individual and refused to return them until officers told her to do so, court documents said.

The individual called 911 the next morning after Simonetti had been banging pots and pans, according to the complaint. The officer who spoke with them could hear loud banging and screaming for a “significant portion” of the roughly 28-minute call. They reported Simonetti had cut off Wi-Fi and had little ability to communicate with anyone to find a new place.
…
Officers at the scene heard loud music playing inside the home and loud metal clanking, the complaint said. When talking with police, Simonetti said she was “singing praise to the lord” and having devotional time. The officers said her behavior was erratic, per court documents.

Case closed. Crazy obnoxious landlady had her behavior recorded by the police, no wonder she was found guilty.

My major question remains unanswered, though.

Police later reviewed a video the individual recorded of Simonetti and the man, which showed the pair talking through a closed door while music was playing loudly, according to the complaint. The video later showed the door was breached, and Simonetti throwing a live tarantula onto stairs leading to the basement and spraying an “unknown substance” in the stairwell.

Where did she get the tarantula? What happened to the poor spider afterwards?

Simonetti is a Republican nutjob running for the US Senate. She doesn’t have a prayer, and she definitely won’t get my vote.

The Newt Solution

It never fails — a Republican leader always turns out to be an absolute idiot. Behold, Newt Gingrich’s plan for getting oil tankers past the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead of fighting over a 21-mile-wide bottleneck forever, we cut a new channel through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you’ve got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks.

Easy! Just nuke UAE and Oman put a chain of craters across them. Can you see any problems with that? Here’s a short summary.

Realistically, it would take three to five years to survey and map the canal, identify where to place the nuclear devices, prepare the route, and drill explosion wells. Add another one to two years for the actual detonations, blasting out millions of tons of sand and rock, and creating a trench 400 meters wide and 60 meters deep. Then it would take another five to ten years to complete the canal, including dredging, smoothing, lock construction, and the necessary “cool-down” period.

So, not an instant solution to the current crisis.

But even if feasible, it’s not practical. The experiments conducted nearly 70 years ago by the Americans and Soviets found that the fallout and radiation released into the atmosphere by even a few nuclear devices negated the time benefits. Moreover, the immediate zone – the canal being built – would remain so radioactive that it would make the passageway too dangerous to transit for decades.

Would that still be friendly territory after that kind of treatment?

This is new

I walked back into work this morning — the place is really dead today, I think a lot of students are struggling to get back to campus, and those who are here aren’t enthused about walking across snow-choked streets. Since I’d been absent for a few days myself, I had a bunch of chores to catch up on, herding flies and checking on spiders, so I had to do more walking than usual. I noticed something annoying.

I’ve got this torn meniscus in my right knee that has been going untreated, in the hopes that it would close up on its own. It hasn’t. As I was walking, I noticed that my right knee was getting gradually hotter and hotter, like a mechanical part that was out of lubricant. It was getting so hot that I imagined it bursting into flames as I spiraled down into a catastrophic fiery explosion.

I have done the sensible thing and am sitting down in my office as the heat slowly dies down. I don’t think I have to worry about crashing now, but I was concerned about my right pants leg catching fire.

I don’t have to move until my class at 1:00, and I should have cooled down by then. If you hear about a case of spontaneous combustion in western Minnesota, though, I thought I’d let you know so you can all say you know the guy.

The mad tyrant speaks

Well, we know that gas prices are rising, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, oil tankers are stacking up before the strait, bombs are falling on Tehran, Tel Aviv, and all kinds of nearby countries, and honestly, I don’t know what’s happening or what’s going to happen, because my country is being run by a senile madman. Also, the media aren’t helping. For instance, here’s a report from Bloomberg that says that Trump is adamant and is going to keep the pressure on.

A senior Arabian Gulf official warned that it would ultimately only be the sustained rise in oil prices that would force Trump to stop fighting and claim victory, leaving regional allies to deal with the residual threat from a wounded and angry Iran.

For the moment, Trump is vowing to continue the campaign, claiming he’s not ready for a deal — though Iran is. Officials in Tehran remain convinced they can outlast the mercurial US leader, but the damage is mounting.

He shouldn’t have started this war in the first place, but OK, he’s taking a position. A stupid position, but let’s deal with it. Except this is the very next paragraph:

Trump pivoted sharply over the weekend to calling for other countries to join the fray to reopen the strait — a possibility seen in those capitals as ranging from questionable to fanciful. From his Florida golf course, Trump sent a string of mixed messages on social media, calling for support in a war he’s said repeatedly he’s won, and for help in a strait his administration has insisted remains open. He claimed Saturday that Iran wanted a deal, which Iran dismissed.

So now he’s begging for aid from his “allies” to reopen the strait while simultaneously claiming that he has “won” his “war”, if that’s what they’re calling it now. What’s obvious is that Trump done fucked up, has delusions of grandeur, and is going to continue to screw up the world. Now he’s talking about “taking” Cuba.

He can do whatever he wants, and the institutions of the United States, the Supreme Court and Congress, will do nothing to oppose him…while 30% of the country is also cheerleading for his insanely destructive assault on responsible leadership.

We’re the most dangerous country in the world. This is not going to end well, and we’ll deserve it.

Let’s end Spring Break for good

This year’s Spring Break is over, and it was a mess, as usual. The students got a full week of vacation, while I got nothing, other than a pile of grading and the need to do their lab work for them (admittedly, a small trivial bit of their work, because flies keep breeding no matter what the calendar says). Then we had a blizzard, which has disrupted everyone’s travel schedules — I have students who will miss class for the entire first half of this week, because airlines have been cancelling all kinds of flights into the upper midwest.

My modest suggestion is that in future years we abolish the tradition of Spring Break. Everyone just stays at the university working, and then we finish up the term a week early. Less chaos! More order! No more resetting unrealistic expectations by allowing them to escape to a warm sunny beach somewhere. No more youthful debauchery. Reality is cold, icy, white landscapes scoured by bitter winds, overseen by dour gray-bearded taskmasters. The sooner they get used to it, the better.

There may be some initial resistance, but everyone will eventually adapt, and I won’t have to go through this yearly ritual of having to modify course- and lab-work to accommodate these unserious childish hijinks.


No one is learning biology here.

How to kick a professor off campus

The bowtie makes me suspicious right away

I shouldn’t have to tell my students that I don’t regard their backpacks as urinals, but apparently some professors have issues.

A Macalester College student has accused her chemistry professor of pissing (“urinating,” to use the legal term) on her backpack last December, reports the Mac Weekly. That prof, identified in a police report regarding “fourth-degree intentional damage to property” (well that really removes a lot of the nuance from the incident), is Paul Fischer, who is no longer a Mac employee.

That’s a first to me. There is an official police report on the incident.

A report from the St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) states that, on Feb. 6 at 9:41 a.m., a Macalester student informed SPPD officers that an individual had urinated on her belongings on Dec. 5, 2025, on Macalester’s campus. The report names former Macalester chemistry Professor Paul Fischer as the suspect in the case.

According to a statement SPPD spokesperson Alyssa Arcand made to the Pioneer Press, the student left her backpack unattended for several minutes in a classroom building and discovered urine on it when she returned.

So the event happened at the end of Fall term. Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Fischer is abruptly terminated.

On Feb. 19, chemistry Professor Keith Kuwata sent an email to all chemistry majors and minors, as well as biology majors with a biochemistry emphasis, stating that “Fischer is no longer an employee of Macalester College and is not authorized to be anywhere on campus.”

Kuwata’s email also notes that it has been “an unsettling time for many of you.” He stated that the department’s top priorities were student well-being and academic success.

My sympathies to the chemistry faculty at Macalester, that’s a rough decision to make, to suddenly drop a professor early in the term. I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by a professor suddenly losing his mind. That comment about “an unsettling time” suggests there is a lot more to the story, but they aren’t talking.

Apparently, Fischer started teaching at Macalester in 2001, not much different from me, starting at UMM in 2000. Do professors typically start falling apart around the 25 year mark? Should I be worried?

Again, I want to reassure my students that I probably won’t start pissing on everything.

Spring break surprise

Spring break is almost over, and classes resume on Monday, maybe.

So of course nature is getting its revenge. We’re under a blizzard watch from 7pm tonight until Monday at 4pm, as my students are trying to get back, but already I’m hearing from some that flights are delayed or cancelled. Classes are going to be under “reduced operations” on Monday, but they aren’t canceled, so I’ll be teaching over Zoom. Whee!

It’s already snowing.

Welcome back to Minnesota, gang!

Marcus Ranum is one scary guy

I’m reading his assessment of the Iran War to date (you should too, depressing as it is), and feeling the same despair I think he is. This is a massive clusterfuck with no good outcome, but Marcus makes a prediction anyway.

Prediction: the US won’t lose. Because the Iranians don’t have the logistics or means to reach us. We’ll declare victory and head home for a ticker-tape parade, etc. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv will get as flattened as Gaza. I’m not sure how I feel about that, so I have been employing a trick I have used for years, which is simply not to feel. My, how interesting. Israel finally managed to talk the US into attacking Iran for them, and it’s the most incompetent thing anyone has ever seen. That’s the problem with hiring stupid people. The US won’t lose, Iran won’t lose, but Israel is fucked – unless they can convince the US to help pay for their repairs. Which is so absurd, I ought to expect it. The economic impact of repairing the damage Israel has suffered is incalculable. In a rational world, this would actually be the end of Israel because most of the population would fuck off back to Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Russia where they came from, “Well that didn’t work.” To me, this is one of the crazy things about politics: in a semi-rational world, that would actually be a possibility: 95% of Israel ups and quits, and the remainder go “time we learn to negotiate, huh?” The Israelis have thoroughly imploded their own myth that their government is tough and savvy. That might be good for them to realize.

That sounds about right. As we have so many times before, we’ll devastate a country and pretend we’ve won a great victory. It’s an interesting idea that maybe, finally, Israel has bit off far more than it can chew. We’re also sending in 2000 marines — I’m not sure what they can do against a population of 93 million riled up people with AK47s and missiles, but that sounded familiar, too.

I’ve read all the Flashman novels. They’re sitting on a bookshelf in my living room right now. In case you’re unfamiliar, they’re comedic historical novels about the rise of the British empire, centered on a character who is a bully and a self-serving poltroon who serves in all the major 19th century conflicts in Asia, Africa, North America, and even has a few escapades in Europe. He’s always a hair’s breadth from total disaster, but manages to pull through at the last moment, often at the cost of thousands of lives, including those of his fellow British soldiers.

Marcus is not a Flashman-like figure, but he does remind me sometimes of George McDonald Fraser, the author of the series, who is sitting back describing the horrors of these wars with some detachment. One of the themes of the books is the devastating incompetence of the British leadership, who can rescue their reputations by sending in masses of young men who will be ruined and wrecked by the experience, but can be praised by the generals as Heroes of the British Empire, who themselves escape scot-free and go home to their manors to sip brandy and tell war stories.

Pete Hegseth is setting up a few thousand noble sacrifices. You won’t be able to criticize him without besmirching the memory of the gallant marines who gave their all for their country, he thinks.

Marcus has also written a letter he would like to slip into the mailboxes of his neighbors who previously festooned their homes with Trump signs, since mysteriously taken down because they’re all chickenshits. It’s a good letter, honest and forthright, but I’d urge him not to post it. It sounds like a death threat to all Trump supporters. I agree with it — they’re all traitors and are responsible for everything our country might once have stood for — but this is not the time. They still have too much power. We need to tear down the right-wing establishment, and then we can bring their lackeys to a terrible justice.

Or more likely, like Flashman, they’re going to end up rich and praised, telling stories about grand victories that will be resolved by another century of idiocy.