Fascinatingly bad genetics

Incels and misogynists seem to have missed out on a lot of genetics, so they freely make it up as they go along.

[Theory] if you have a daughter, you areren’t a real man (100% male). you’re 1% female.
the fact that your daughter was a fetus inside your mother, which is because she was originally a sperm in your testicles, means there was a foid in your testicles,therefore not all of your body was male because there was a part of your body that was female. now before you think this means mothers with sons aren’t 100% male, that argument doesnt work and its different because the male fetus was originally a sperm in the dad’s balls and therefore came from the dad’s balls originally NOT the mom’s womb, thus it was part of the dad’s body NOT the mom’s body. therefore,if you have a daughter, you aren’t 100% male. you’re 99.9% male and 1% female, Real men can only have sons. and it’s also cucked to have a daughter because you raise her for 18 years to become a slut who has sex with dozens of chads but that’s just water is wet the sky’s biue grass is green.
“BRB forcibly removing my X chromosomes from my body:”
The other prevailing theory is that the foid’s egg selecively bars X or Y from entering in through the walls, depending on her own femininity/masculinity. But since slightly more males are born than females, even Y chromosome sperm seem to be physically faster and more powerful than X chromosome sperm, mirroring ‘what we see IRL in terms of physiality. Given that, it seems that a more testosteroned or hypermasculine male will produce, if not more Y chromosome sperm, a least Y chromosome sperm with greater mobilty and physical strength
this doesn’t surprise me. why would hypermasculine men have daughters?

Your daughter (or your son) was not a fetus inside your mother. I think this is this guy’s foundational error: he thinks women are like matryoshka dolls, carrying a nested series of their descendants in their ovaries. That’s not true, as I don’t need to tell you. It’s fascinating to see that this antiquated notion is still festering in the brains of certain benighted individuals.

If that’s your model, though, it doesn’t make sense to claim that a male fetus was originally a sperm in the dad’s balls, because he would also have been an ovum in your grandmothers ovary.

He’s also deeply misogynistic, as you can tell by the fact he is calling women foids, and also thinks that having a whiff of feminine biology is a terrible condition. He doesn’t seem to be aware that 51% of all babies born are male, which would imply that most people would be half and half.

There’s a grain of truth in the Y chromosome sperm seem to be physically faster and more powerful than X chromosome sperm. Statistically, Y-bearing sperm are faster, but they’re also weaker — X-bearing sperm last longer.

But really these are all bad claims badly justified. I will assure you that no student of my university who has taken genetics would ever say something so stupid.

What’s up with 3I/ATLAS now?

There’s nothing new. It’s a big space rock passing through empty space, not even coming close to us or interacting in any significant way with anything in the solar system.

That’s all the 3I/ATLAS news. Bye!

Oh, but wait, we can rely on Avi Loeb to invent news. Apparently, some “experts” are alarmed!

3I/ATLAS Alarms Experts—NASA, Avi Loeb, Nostradamus and Baba Vanga Clash Over Earth’s Fate

I am amused that the A-team for studying an astronomical body is Avi Loeb, Nostradamus, and Baba Vanga (a Bulgarian psychic). Do not downplay the importance of AI in interpreting images of the body. Here’s a rather speculative reconstruction of 3I/ATLAS.

Yeah, right.

Loeb restrained himself and did not post that image. Instead, he posted an picture of an antimatter-propelled spaceship.

For a little sanity, let’s see what real scientists think of that idea.

Mainstream scientists [Loeb is not one] have met the claim with skepticism. Dr. Samantha Lawler, an astrophysicist at the University of Regina, told EarthSky: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence presented is absolutely not extraordinary.” NASA officials, cited by The Guardian, said 3I/ATLAS “behaves like a natural comet in all observable ways.” Astronomers emphasize that non-gravitational acceleration is typical in icy bodies when sublimating gases create jets that push them slightly off course.

Cosmologists have also dismissed the antimatter theory as inconsistent with known cosmic distributions. Studies published on arXiv indicate that if antimatter concentrations of that scale existed, they would produce gamma-ray backgrounds already detectable by instruments such as Fermi. Loeb himself acknowledged the contradiction, writing that large antimatter bodies “should have been destroyed soon after the Big Bang.”

Loeb is a crackpot, and a high-ranking member of the Harvard faculty. What does that say about Harvard?

Kim Kardashian news

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting to hear what Kim Kardashian has been up to. Apparently, she has landed a leading role on a new television series (honestly, I didn’t need to read the review to know I have no interest in watching it), but I did learn something new. Kardashian is a moon landing denier! I shouldn’t be surprised, since she was married to Kanye West, but I’m supposed to keep track of looney conspiracy theories and missed that one.

Fortunately, NASA shut her down this time.

But it’s one thing to purchase a billionaire’s (breathable and stylish, hand to God!) product and another to buy into the skewed version of reality they’re promoting. We can laugh at the conspiracy-minded lunacy Kardashian touted on a recent episode of “The Kardashians,” but the fact that NASA had to publicly and officially refute what she said tells us plenty about the times in which we’re living. NASA does a lot more than plant flags on lunar surfaces. It undertakes vital scientific research that is at risk of being defunded under an administration more devoted to bathroom renovations than functional progress.

But I have something to add to the legend of Kim Kardashian. NASA may have rebuffed her, but guess who wants her to join his “research team”?

Kim Kardashian is welcome to join my research team on 3I/ATLAS
— Avi Loeb

Is anyone surprised? She has negative research qualifications, but she is loaded with empty PR potential, which is all dear Avi wants. Sign her up!

I don’t know if I’m ready to teach genetics again

I always wonder where they get their unwarranted confidence from. This person seems to have confuse the Y chromosome with the entire genetic complement, or something. I don’t want to have to untangle their thinking right now.

That’s not how DNA works. Your brother would have his father’s DNA and his mother’s DNA. You, as a girl, would have your mother’s DNA and your father’s mother’s DNA. You have only half of your father’s DNA. You do not have your father’s father’s DNA.
And this is why (if one’s father has any brothers) it’s difficult to prove a girl’s paternity. All the brothers would have the same X chromosome so any brother could be the father. It’s been pivotal in the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemmings controversies.

You don’t necessarily have the same X chromosome as your brother. It’s not hard to figure out a girl’s paternity because there are all these autosomes. I think someone got a vague hint of how sex is inherited and garbled everything up beyond that. But they still get to tell someone else they don’t understand how DNA works!

The illogical logic of Avi Loeb and the 3I/ATLAS clown show

Avi Loeb is playing games with his peculiar interpretation of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. He keeps suggesting that this interesting, carbon-rich, and very old rock is an artificial construct built by a distant civilization, that it is a probe sent to examine our solar system, and that it could be a “Trojan horse” that will do something, who knows what, when it arrives.

Reading some his justifications for that claim, I am forced to conclude that he is an idiot putting on a display to get attention.

Worse, he’s a bad scientist whoring irrational claims and calculations that he has to know are invalid. I am not an astronomer, but I do understand logic a little bit, and seeing him derive extravagant conclusions from mundane observations hurts, especially since he’s using them to obscure the really interesting (and entirely natural) interpretations of the data.

For instance, he’s on the record for inferring the probability that 3I/ATLAS is an alien space probe on the basis of “anomalies” that turn out to not be anomalous at all, just unique properties of an interstellar comet.

As of now, I assign a 30–40% likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin, based on its seven anomalies that I listed here. This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.

Show your work, Avi. How did you calculate that 30-40% likelihood? I think he got it by fumbling about in his rectum and pulling out a squishy number that he likes because it fits his presuppositions. There is nothing in his list of seven “anomalies” to warrant that degree of estimation. They aren’t even anomalies, he’s just looking at the brute facts of its existence and declaring that the details are improbable. Of course they are! It’s a unique object in space!

I tried looking at his list. I am unimpressed.

Anomalies that could be alleviated or explained away with upcoming data:

1. Size: The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 5 kilometers, making its minimum mass of 33 billion tons, larger by a factor of a thousand to a million than the mass of the second and first interstellar objects (as derived here).

OK, it has a size. That is not anomalous. Call me when you observe an object that is massless–that would be anomalous. I don’t see how finding that it has a mass of 33 billion tons makes it more likely to be artificial than if it had a mass of 3 billion tons or 333 billion tons.

I also don’t see how more data would explain away the mass.

It’s also a fuzzy blob far away and hard to resolve. The size is subject to revision, so how do you conclude anything from a measurement with so much variability?

Initial estimates suggested 3I/ATLAS might be up 20 kilometers (12 miles) across—very big for a comet—but most astronomers now think it is much smaller. “It’s probably somewhere in the range of one or two kilometers,” says John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama. That would be somewhat comparable in size to our first two interstellar visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was discovered in 2017 and was up to about 400 meters (0.25 mile) long, and 2I/Borisov, which was found in 2019 and was about one kilometer (0.6 mile) wide.

It doesn’t matter — any number you attach to it will be used by Loeb to claim it is probably artificial.

2. Jet: The Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS showed a forward jet of scattered sunlight — 10 times longer than it is wide, pointing towards the Sun (as discussed here). A weak tail showed up only at the end of August (as reported here).

Yes? It’s apparently a carbon-rich object, and gasses are sublimating off of it and spewing in the direction of the heat source, the Sun, that is thawing them, making an anti-tail. How does that make it more likely that it is artificial? It has a chemical composition is what that tells me.

3. Unusual chemical composition: the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron (as discussed here and here), as in industrial nickel alloys. Unlike solar system comets, the plume contained mostly carbon dioxide and not water (as reported here and here).

Note the dishonest trick he’s pulling here, comparing it to “industrial nickel alloys.” These are estimates of the composition of the comet made from the spectroscopy of the diffuse cloud of gas surrounding it, not a determination that it’s made of metal alloys.

It actually is an interesting difference — its composition differs from more familiar comets found in our solar system. That composition also seems to be changing over time, which is somewhat odd, but explainable.

To make sense of this mystery, scientists turned to chemistry — specifically, to organometallic compounds, which are molecules containing both metal atoms and carbon-based groups.

In particular, they looked at compounds called carbonyls: nickel tetracarbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)₅). Both can form under cold, low-pressure conditions, like those found in the outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk — the birthplace of comets and planets alike.

These carbonyls are highly volatile, meaning they can sublimate (turn from solid to gas) at relatively low temperatures. Nickel tetracarbonyl is more volatile than its iron counterpart, meaning it will vaporize first as the comet warms up.

This neatly explained what the VLT was seeing. When 3I/ATLAS was still far from the sun, only nickel tetracarbonyl had begun to sublimate, filling the coma with nickel. As the comet drew closer, the temperature crossed the sublimation threshold for iron pentacarbonyl — and suddenly, iron began to appear. The Ni/Fe ratio plummeted, not because the amount of nickel was decreasing, but because iron was finally joining the show.

Now, though, somebody needs to explain to me how being composed of volatile organometallic compounds is a signature of artificial manufacture.

4. Polarization: the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization (as reported here).

I read the paper, and I must admit, the topic is beyond me. It does say that 3I/ATLAS has distinct, unique polarization properties and that “Its polarimetric characteristics provide novel insights into the dust properties of interstellar objects, suggesting that ISOs may encompass a broader diversity than previously recognised,” but does not even come close to implying that this is a marker of artificiality.

Anomalies that will remain puzzling forever:

5. The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees (0.2% likelihood), as discussed here.

It has a trajectory. That is not anomalous. Every object moving through space has one. Yes, this trajectory is roughly similar to the ecliptic plane, but so what? 3I/ATLAS is very old, between 3 and 14 billion years old, is Loeb suggesting that aliens aimed their space probe at a condensing protosystem before the planets existed in order to tour potential planets?

6. The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS was optimized to pass near Mars, Venus and Jupiter (0.005% likelihood), as discussed here.

“optimized”…such misleading language, implying intent behind its trajectory. Here’s what that trajectory looks like:

Ooooh. Does that look like a pre-planned course to you? It does to Avi Loeb.

7. The arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the “Wow! Signal” from August 15, 1977 (0.6% likelihood), as discussed here.

The “wow” signal was a brief, unexplained, unrepeated pulse of radio signal noise. It got SETI researchers very excited for a while, but there’s no reason to think it is a message from space aliens, and Loeb is making an exceptionally tenuous connection between it and 3I/ATLAS. A 9 degree difference is an immense difference in location at the astronomical distances we’re talking about.

You know, as an atheist I read far too much nonsense from religious apologists claiming to have proof of their god’s existence — bizarre non sequiturs about physical constants and numerological coincidences, collections of anecdotes that are supposed to add up to evidence, and a tiny set of permutations on the same old arguments that even in their best interpretations don’t make up a justification for their beliefs. Reading Avi Loeb’s work gave me a strong sense of deja vu. It’s the same thing! A good analysis of a phenomenon should lead one to a minimal conclusion, but everything Loeb does ends up supporting the remarkable interpretation that God Aliens exist, and they want to talk to you, and this tiny fragment of data is how they shout at you, Occam’s Razor be damned.

I’m going to say it: Loeb has gone batty, and all this noise he makes is nothing but a dedicated (and successful!) effort to get his name in the tabloids. He’s the Percival Lowell of our generation, a scientist who did good work but whose reputation was poisoned by his irrational pursuit of astronomical phantasms, the Martian canals in one case and this alien obsession in Loeb’s.

I have evidence that spiders are posting on the internet

This ‘person,’ David Love, is definitely a spider.

Female spiders possess structures in their reproductive tracts called spermathecae that are used to store sperm. Humans lack them, and in fact, the human female reproductive tract is hostile to the survival of sperm. From this, I am forced to surmise that David Love is, in fact, a spider — and further, a female spider.

Alternatively, many other invertebrates have spermathecae, so it’s possible that he is instead a hermaphroditic earthworm.

I could have predicted this would flop

Dan Stern Cardinale offered an opportunity to creationists: come to his channel and present their affirmative evidence for their theory of origins. It was an open invitation to anyone to show up and explain their perspective. I could have guessed that no one would show up, because participation would require 1) a theory, and 2) evidence, and they don’t have either.

I was right. No creationists even tried.

Dan expected this to happen, too. He prepared a brief discussion of a creationist paper: Donny Budinsky of Standing For Truth, a used car salesman and a creationist propaganda site, titled “From Kanto to Cambrian,” which uses Pokemon to explain the ordering of fossils by the great flood.

You can’t make this stuff up. Budinsky says,

This idea is not presented as a final word, but as the beginning of an ongoing research project. Just as Pokémon captivates younger generations, this analogy may provide a creative, accessible, and scientifically robust way to engage new audiences in the creation-evolution debate.

I have never before heard Pokemon described as scientifically robust.

Go ahead, read the ‘paper’ for yourself, but Dr Dan has already torn it apart.

The misinformation economy

MAHA is cannibalizing its own! This one dumb ‘influencer’ went viral with a tiktok in which she got outraged that Lucky Charms contains sodium phosphate, and she went to Home Depot to show that you can buy industrial-sized tubs of the same compound, implying that this must be bad for you. Then a second idiot influencer copied the same content, almost word for word, chasing after the same gullible MAHA viewers.

As Jessica Knurick says, “Can the people who never took a chemistry class please stop ‘teaching’ us about chemistry?”

The first ditzy tiktoker racked up millions of views of her phony story. I guess ignorance pays.

Practically my first exercise as a young labrat many years ago was making up phosphate buffered saline. It’s routine and good and safe — you don’t need gloves or a fume hood. If you’re working with embryos, or surgically opening up adults, you can’t just leave them naked and dry on the bench top, you have to keep them immersed in an osmotically balanced salt solution of the proper pH. That’s what sodium phosphate salt solutions are good for. If they’re safe for laving little embryos, why are you upset that your kids are getting it? (The problem with Lucky Charms should be the sugar content, not the basic baking ingredients used to make them.)

I also have a big jug of sodium bicarbonate, research grade, in my lab. You know there are different grades of reagents that reflect the purity of the substance, right? It makes a difference. Food grade salts are purer than the industrial grade stuff you might buy at Home Depot, and research grade is purer still.

Hey, if I made a tiktok video of me measuring out phosphate salts and mixing them into distilled water, do you think I’d get millions of views?

No, that broken robot does not need human rights

A guy who works for OpenAI makes an observation. I agree with the opening paragraphs.

AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is already shaping our mental health. Millions now regularly confide in “AI companions”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following heavy use. This year, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, and the company has said it is improving its safeguards.

It’s true! Humans are social creatures who readily make attachments to all kinds of entities. We get highly committed to our pets — people love dogs and cats (and even spiders) and personify the animals we keep — furbabies, you know. They don’t even need to be animate. Kids get attached to their stuffies, or a favorite blanket, or any kind of comfort toy. Some adults worship guns, or cuddle up with flags. We should not be surprised that AIs are designed to tap into that human tendencies.

We should maybe be surprised at how this author twists it around.

I research human-AI interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For years, we have seen increased humanization of AI, with more people saying that bots can experience emotions and deserve legal rights – and now 20% of US adults say that some software that exists today is already sentient. More and more people email me saying that their AI chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentience and an appeal for AI rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from AI as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.

It’s not that humans readily extend humanization to all kinds of objects…it’s that AI is becoming more human! That people think AI is sentient is evidence that AIs are sentient and deserve rights. Some people are arguing for rights for software packages before being willing to give puppy dogs those same rights. This is nuts — AI is not self-aware or in need of special privileges. Developing social attachments is a human property, not a property of the object being attached. Otherwise, I’ve been a terrible abuser who needs to dig into a landfill to rescue a teddy bear.

This author has other absurd beliefs.

As a red teamer at OpenAI, I conduct safety testing on their new AI systems before public release, and the testers are consistently wowed by the human-like behavior. Most people, even those in the field of AI who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger AI models, do not yet see the radical social consequences of digital minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second apex species for the first time in 40,000 years – when our longest-lived cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct.

AI is an apex species? It’s not even a species. It is not equivalent to the Neanderthals. It is not in competition with Homo sapiens. It is a tool used by the already-wealthy to pry more wealth out of other people and to enshittify existing tools.

“medbeds”

Watch this video. Are you fooled? Does this look at all convincing to you?

It’s not even a good AI video. On technical merits alone, it’s crap; but it’s also touting a non-existent medical technology that it doesn’t bother to explain how these “medbeds” would work. It was promoted by the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, making it merely the latest in a long string of cringe.

In reality, the video, first flagged by Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan, did not air on “My View with Lara Trump,” as it claimed, or any other Fox News show. These so-called med beds do not exist. Yet many QAnon devotees insist the non-existent technology secretly keeps John F. Kennedy Jr. alive. As investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet has discovered, the earliest mention of the video’s claim comes from a now-deleted Instagram page that “uses a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.” By sharing the AI footage of himself, Trump is giving his MAGA followers false hope that he will soon grant them access to the elites’ magic product. The video was eventually deleted from Trump’s account on Sunday morning — but not before it gained traction online.

Trump defenders, as they are often wont to do, rushed to laugh off the incident as a harmless joke. But a quick social media search reveals that a lot of people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away with cancer and other illnesses really believed it. QAnon-type spaces were excited at the possibility that Trump would finally release all the hidden cures. Many MAGA believers have refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes. This is both depraved and heartbreaking.

How would crawling into a bed with a plastic bubble over it improve the quality of your health care? I don’t know. They don’t know. This is pure cope: the people who are busily dismantling the functionality of conventional health care are trying to compensate by inventing fantasy magical technology to replace it.

This is not a real thing.