OK, gang, help me out here. I’m swamped today — my morning is destroyed because I have to go in to the clinic for my annual thorough extensive physical check-up, and I get out just in time for my afternoon class, and then I’m free, sort of. Except that I have to compose a 10 question online quiz on chromosome variations.

So give me some good questions on deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations. Preferably questions that can be easily machine-scored, but I do throw in an essay question or two.

Get to work. I’ll expect them in the comments section here when I get back at 1:30.

Don’t disappoint me.

“Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna’ be fooled again!”

Wee Free Men

It’s almost spring-like outside — the skies are clear, we’ve got cool breezes on a comfortable day, the plants are coming back… I know it can’t last but I’ll make the most of it. I’ve opened windows to let birdsong in and to drive the cat crazy.

Let the pleasant conversations flow!

Previous Thread

Ed Brayton and I set up freethoughtblogs as a cooperative venture. Although we did try running ads to bring in some revenue, ads proved to be intrusive and obnoxious — blog ads tend to play all kinds of stupid games to get your attention — so we gave up on that. So right now the site runs in the red, just a little bit, and that’s OK. My Patreon account covers the server cost just fine, and I’m not interested in profit.

By comparison, take a look at the financials for Truth Social.

Trump Media & Technology Group burned through a staggering $712 million last year while bringing in a mere $3.7 million in revenue, a ratio as upside-down as Trump has turned the country.

There’s no actual business here, just a megaphone for a doddering old man.

To be fair, you could also call Pharyngula “a megaphone for a doddering old man,” but at least I’m not blowing $700 million to keep it running. I suspect there’s an interesting leak in the money pipeline that is diverting donations from billionaires to inflate that budget, and that leak is spilling money into Trump’s pocket, so it’s not a real loss to him.

I’m going to have to get a few more patreon followers if it costs hundreds of millions to run a website.

The commenters here are persuasive. I dissed Andy Weir and his new movie, and I was told that it was entertaining and I should give it a chance. So I did. I went to the theater to see Project Hail Mary.

I loathed it.

Sorry.

The premise is garbage. Weir postulates an “astrophage,” a bacterium that harvests carbon from Venus and then streams to the sun, “eating” the sun, collecting vast amounts of energy, dimming the sun, and threatening humanity with extinction within decades. They send a probe to the line flowing between Venus and the Sun and collect the mysterious black particles, bring it back to Earth, and a middle school science teacher looks in a microscope and figures out that it’s an organism that harvests energy from stars.

Stop right there. I’d appreciate it if someone could justify that plot hook, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1950s hack disaster movie. It’s stupid.

Then astronomers notice that all the local stars are experiencing this same mysterious dimming. The “astrophage” must be infectious! Let’s not concern ourselves with the timing: we observe a rapid phenomenon occurring within the lifespan of a single human being simultaneously in a population of stars scattered over a volume 100 light years across. There’s a complete lack of awareness of space and time in this movie.

Humanity’s response is to quickly build a spaceship to fly to the one star, Tau Ceti, that isn’t exhibiting the mysterious dimming to see if they can find a “cure”. Fortunately, the “astrophages” also store such a tremendous amount of energy that they can form a fantastic, near-magical rocket fuel, enabling the construction of a starship that can travel at something near light-speed. This is the kind of exotic nonsensical space fuel you’d find in a 1930s pulp novel.

The plan is to send a small crew with one engineer, one pilot, and one scientist to a star 12 light years away, to collect information about how Tau Ceti was resisting the infection, and then return to Earth with a solution. That’s going to take at least 24 years round-trip, to deal with a crisis that’s going to doom Earth in 30 years. My problem was that my mental calendar was getting hopelessly lost by this time.

Then the scientist who is expected to lead this critical mission to stop human extinction was the middle school science teacher. This teacher is the charming, charismatic, appealing Ryan Gosling. We’re doomed if that is our selection criterion.

The ship takes off. Next thing we know, Ryan Gosling wakes up from an induced coma (that’s how humans can survive a 12 light-year trip?), the two other crew members have died — no explanation provided, but nice to know pilots and engineers are superfluous — and Gosling has amnesia.

That’s just the setup for the main part of the story, and it’s such radically nonsensical and unscientific garbage that I felt like walking out, and only stayed in my seat by virtue of Ryan Gosling’s charm and the curiosity and need to find out how the story would crawl out of this mass of sewage.

No spoilers. You’ll have to suffer as I did if you want the answers.

Short answer: Gosling finds a cute chatty alien who is there for the same purpose, and they team up. Don’t worry, there’s none of that complicated first-contact rigamarole to establish communication — they just point at things and say words and use a computer to compile a dictionary. Quickly. Mostly off-screen. Can’t let the whole alien complication that Weir has introduced get in the way of the whole star-eating space bacteria problem that Weir introduced!

Gosling also has a Weir staple: a white board that he can scribble on to solve science problems. For example, Gosling discovers a problem that will make the alien’s spaceship break down on the way to its home in 40 Eridani. So he scribbles some stuff on the white board and decides to fly off to the rescue, and somehow find this stranded spaceship somewhere between Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani. Are you surprised to learn that he does? Spaceships are easy! All you need for interstellar navigation is a white board and a collection of colored markers, and a pilot with no training who was hired on the basis of his entertaining middle-school science classes.

Ryan Gosling is a good actor who gave a great performance in an unbelievable role, and the alien (named Rocky) was amusing and somewhat original, but you will never, ever, ever, ever convince me to see another movie based on an Andy Weir book. He’s a hack.

Jesus christ, that movie was fucking stupid.

The world, and especially the United States right now, sucks. So I have little rituals to keep me somewhat balanced by, for instance, reading a set of webcomics every morning. Of course, I still have to complain about them, but the intent is there.

The Far Side frequently cheers me up with comics featuring spiders. There’s one today:

The Far Side

Has anyone else noticed a fondness for multi-limbed aliens in recent SF? It only makes sense, since humans are chronically under-supplied with limbs, and the ones we’ve got are over-specialized to specific functions. Or maybe it’s just my taste in SF.

Although…the newest Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary, is being released as a movie, with a cute 5-armed alien, and I’m not going to watch it. I’ve detested all of Weir’s books since The Martian, which I wanted to throw at the wall and then set on fire. In general, I’ve grown to dislike novels about rescuing all of humanity with some guy in a spaceship, and I especially dislike Weir’s style of episodic cliffhangers resolved with epically unlikely instances of plot armor.

Wait, I’m supposed to cheer myself up with this stuff.

OK, come on xkcd.

xkcd

Naturally, the first spot I looked at was my home on the map. I’m in the western part of Minnesota, in what is called the prairie pothole region, surrounded by shallow lakes scoured out by glaciers. So that part is kind of right, but incomplete. I’d say the dominant force on the landscape around me is agriculture. We’ve only got tiny patches of native prairie left. The boundary waters farther north are pristine, so far, but the Republicans are scheming to open that up for copper mining. I’m going to have to redo that map and replace most of it with the legend “PEOPLE”.

One last attempt to salvage some optimism. I bought myself a Kobo e-book reader, and another ritual I have is to read something non-political every night before bed. I got this Kobo with a special deal: it came pre-loaded with every book Terry Pratchett ever published. Can’t go wrong there!

I recently finished Men at Arms, which is pure escapist fantasy. It’s got dragons in it. It’s also about a policeman who takes his civic duties as a servant of the people seriously. I know, dragons? I can suspend disbelief for that, but Sam Vimes is stretching credibility. Also, this book is about the importance of diversity, and efforts to widen representation in the city watch, another ridiculous fantasy element.

I’ve just started on Jingo, a very timely choice, since it’s about the vaguely Western medieval city of Ankh-Morpork going to war with the vaguely Middle Eastern empire of Klatch over a small island in the ocean separating them. It’s disturbingly relevant. It was reassuring to see Sam Vines resist militarizing the City Watch (they’re not a military authority, he says, they’re fellow citizens), but Pratchett better salvage some hope from this situation. I need it.

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.

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.