A common thread among billionaires

Angela Collier points out a bizarre thing these billionaires do: these people — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk — are all college dropouts who couldn’t even finish an undergraduate degree, but now they all claim that they could have been physicists. Apparently anyone can be a physicist. No, wait, that’s not it, physicists have a reputation for being supersmart so these intellectual losers are all pretending to have an interest in physics for the reputation theft — these guys are going to grift everything.

I guess I’m not very bright because I never even wanted to be a physicist and was much more impressed with biologists like François Jacob or Lewis Wolpert or Rachel Carson or Rita Levi-Montalcini. Also, I not only completed my undergraduate degree, I finished a Ph.D. Dumb! Dumb dumb dumb.

If you can make it through the first half hour, you might also be amused at her take on Ayn Rand. She read Atlas Shrugged and enjoyed it because it was so ridiculous that she thought it was a satire. I can see that, but I’m still not going to slog through anything written by Rand.

Halfway across the state and back again

Cars are an expensive pain in the butt. It was time to do some maintenance on the Honda, but the nearest Honda dealer is in St Cloud, so I had to get up early and drive across the state on icy snowy roads to get it serviced. They were quick and bounced me right back on the road to head home again.

I don’t do much driving any more, so this was an opportunity to while away the miles playing old tunes. For some reason, I fired up my old collection of 60s and 70s music. Joan Baez! Laura Nyro!


I got fury in my soul, fury’s gonna take me to the glory goal
In my mind I can’t study war no more
Save the people, save the children
Save the country, save the country, save the country

I think we need to bring back the 60s — the hippies had the right idea. Sure, they were a little vague on how to save the country, but we’ve had over 50 years to think on it. I’m sure we’ve got a plan by now, right?

There is no carol that won’t wear out its welcome

I’ve been avoiding stores for a while now, because they’re all playing the same tired, horrible Christmas carols all the time — I was trying to buy almond milk and eggs the other day and had to flee because Mariah Carey started singing. I’m wishing I could turn that about and carry around a boombox playing this mash up of the carol of the bells and the imperial march when I enter a business.

It goes on for an hour! The one drawback to my plan for revenge is that I’d get sick of this carol 5 minutes after I started.

I think I just sold a house

This house.

A notary just drove out to my house with a stack of documents from the lending company, and I signed them all, and now those documents get shipped back to Seattle for the buyers to sign, and if that all goes smoothly a bunch of money gets wired into the estate account, which I then have to divvy up to ten heirs. Wheee!

Unfortunately, mainly what I feel right now is memories of all the Christmases we had with Mom & Dad in that house. Never more.

May the new owners have many happy Christmases there in the future.

I guess I’m supposed to be happy

Minnesota, as a state, is happier than California?

I don’t quite trust these things. They always have to juggle a whole bunch of parameters to come up with a single composite score like “happiness,” and you can get any answer you want with the right weights. They mention a few inputs but don’t tell us how they manipulate them.

OK, they include weather, but it must be scaled way down for us to beat California.

True story: last week I checked the weather before I went on a walk, and the computer told me it was -3°. No problem, I thought, that was almost balmy. Unfortunately, the weather site was telling me the temperature in °F — my wife prefers Fahrenheit, while I think in Celsius — and that meant it was actually -20°C. I went on my walk, all bundled up, but 20 minutes later noticed that I couldn’t feel my toes.

But sure, Minnesota is much happier than California. At least we’re not in Lose-iana.

Surprise, the Earth is a globe

I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.

This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.

Benjamin Dixon murders the Young Turks

Someone call the police, this was a brutal execution.

Actually, never mind. I never cared much for Cenk Uygur or Ana Kasparian, never subscribed to the Young Turks, gave them at best a little side-eye, so I’m not at all surprised at their steady drift from progressive liberal, sort of, to apologists for MAGA.

I won’t miss them. Maybe some real progressives will benefit as money shifts away from this annoying pair.

One more day

I’m almost finished. A lot of papers have been graded, and all that’s left now is an online final exam for my intro bio course, which has a deadline of 1:00 tomorrow. Now I wait for those finals to be submitted, and then…a few hours of grading, and all is complete.

Also tomorrow I have some end-of-term stuff to wrap up. I’m getting a new computer in the lab, I have to meet a few students who I’ll be working with next semester, I have to do some maintenance on the fly lines we’ll be working with in genetics next term, and then the aforementioned final grading…then I guess I’ll slack off for a day.

Oh, and maybe some spider breeding.

Ask before opening fire

Have you ever had a health insurance claim denied? Before you run out and shoot an insurance executive, use the Claim File Helper to uncover the paper trail that led to the decision.

ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal.

After you’ve followed the chain of decisions, then you can consider terminating some rich a-hole. It’s the polite thing to do.