Behold the contradictions inherent in the system!

I guess there has been a wave of panic-buying of gasoline after a major pipeline was shut down; I haven’t noticed because I’ve been walking everywhere. People were concerned that they wouldn’t have fuel for their daily commute, so they were stockpiling gas in anything that would hold gas, including plastic bags. There are supposed to be safety laws that limit what you can use to store a flammable liquid, but apparently gas station owners were looking the other way. Sometimes, that led to disaster.

A Hummer in Florida burst into flames right after a driver filled four containers with gas.

Citrus County Fire Rescue said they responded to a call at a Texaco Food Mart in Homosassa, Fla. for a vehicle on fire on Wednesday.

Four 5-gallon containers filled with gasoline were in the back of the vehicle when it caught fire, officials said.

Hummers are practically a symbol of self-indulgent excess, so I would have applauded the sight. But what’s really ironic here is that a guy who was concerned about running out of gas is driving around in a Hummer, a vehicle that optimistically gets 10-14mpg. If we really want to save fuel, one way would be to torch every Hummer on the road. Go buy an electric or hybrid or at least a small economy car that gets 30-40 mpg.

Sigh of relief

I shackled myself to the computer today, and I can now report that every assignment, lab report, exam, and term paper for all three of my courses have been read and evaluated and scores entered into my Canvas class page.

I have a few more trivial things to do: I have to download everything into my laptop spreadsheet, because Canvas is too stupid to do normalization and important things like dropping the lowest exam score, as I told my genetics students I would do. I am, however, too brain-dead to do that right now, especially since the Evil Cat decided to deny me many hours of sleep last night. So I’ll do the finicky grade massaging tomorrow morning, and then submit all the grades to the registrar, and be done with this hellish academic year.

OK, so tonight I plan to veg out to something stupid on Netflix or whatever. I’ll have to see what’s available, and it better be really stupid, because I may pass out in the middle of it.

Mousehunt

The goddamn cat decided to go on a goddamn mousehunt at 1am last night. She is no good at it. A mousehunt to her is an opportunity to torture a small helpless creature for a few hours. She finds a mouse, pounces on it, and then lets the terrified beast free to pounce on it again, and again, and again. Last night she played this game going around in circles about my bed, pouncing and jumping and thumping and growling and squeaking until I leapt up screaming, chasing the cat with a broom, trying to break this goddamn cycle and get her out of the room.

There were echoes of similarities with the movie, Mousehunt. I was the Nathan Lane character. If you’ve seen the movie, you know you never want to see yourself in any of the humans.

I could also see hints of myself in the Christopher Walken character, except last night I was doing a lot of futile yelling. Yeah, Nathan Lane.

May die of discouragement soon

I need to vent. I’m grading lab reports, and one of my banes is this: students who assemble a series of tables and plunk them into the results section with no text narrative. Nothing to glue them together. Just Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, I’m done. I tell them in Cell Biology that I hate this, that it’s completely unacceptable, and these students have gone through cell bio. I tell them again in Genetics; I tell them I want them to imagine that all of their tables and figures fell out of the manuscript, but I can get the gist of what the results are from the text. I tell them that a table or figure does not exist if it is not referenced in the text. They’ve done one lab report earlier in the semester, in which this rule was reiterated, and I gave them big fat zeroes on their results section if they committed this sin. Then have to know by now. I’ve emphasized it so many times this term. I tell them in lab. I tell them in lecture. I warn them that this is a huge peeve of mine, and students keep doing it despite my tirades, and this year, finally, I hope the whole class will get it.

First 6 student lab reports: they just have a string of tables for a results section.

Jesus fucking christ. This isn’t hard. Can I just give them all failing grades, quit my job, and apply to be a Walmart greeter? They’re doing worse than they did on the first lab report.

I am not encouraged to continue, but I must. If the next lab report fucks this up, I’m going to explode and my poor wife is going to come home to an office painted in blood and body parts.

I had to think back to the instructions I gave the students with the first lab report.

Introduction. You should explain what a complementation cross is, and you should explain what each of the mutants, scarlet and brown, do. I will not be expecting an extensive literature search; citing your textbook and flybase.org will be adequate.

Methods. Think back: you did a cross of st x st and bw x bw just to make lots of flies. You isolated virgin females to cross st x bw (and maybe did a reciprocal cross) and generate F1 flies. You then crossed the F1 flies to make an F2 generation. Explain all those steps! Imagine that your methods will be used by next year’s students to replicate this experiment.

Results. The core of the results section will be the data that is currently in a spreadsheet on Google. Reformat that into two pretty tables. You don’t have to include the entirety of the raw data; you might want to sum up particular categories. It’s all up to you how you present it. NOTE: Just the tables will not be an adequate results section. You must have a text narrative that explains the tables.

Discussion. Now interpret the results. Tell me what you expected, summarize what you observed, and do some statistics. Did what we saw fit the expectations? Remember that you looked at multiple phenomena. Are the sex ratios what you expected? Was one mutant more viable than the other? Are there anomalies in the data set, like maybe some groups got completely wacky results? Explain what must have happened. Another NOTE: there’s always a tendency to agonize over what went wrong. Try to emphasize the positive conclusions from the experiment.

I pretty much told them exactly what I expected. I also went over this in lecture and lab. I don’t know what went wrong, so I’m just going to blame COVID-19.

Lab reports are all graded now, and I didn’t die, yet. I’ve got to escape, though, so I’m going out for Mexican (I’m vaccinated! I can!): fish tacos and a margarita should help. Then I come back to do the next big assignment.

The students are all done!

My final exams were due yesterday, and the students worked hard and got them all done and submitted online. I imported them all into Google Docs so I could mark them up electronically, and there they all are, lined up in nice tidy rows and columns on my drive, pristine and clean and organized. Lookin’ good! Pages and pages and pages of neatly typed essays and answers to problems! I give the computer an A+ for holding and organizing all that data. I admire the students for getting so much done.

Wait, what do mean, I’m not done?

I have to read all these things? And grade them?

Holy hell, that’s insane. Look at all of them! And I’m so damn tired.

OK, here’s the deal. I’m going to flee the house on a morning walk, but I’ll come back and then buckle down to methodically plowing through all this stuff, with the goal of maybe getting it all done by Friday, because I have things to do. I’m not going to enjoy myself, though. But I know I’ve got 58 students waiting anxiously on my final judgment, so I guess I’m going to have to do it.

But then, this weekend, I intend to be completely free.

“tastes like the casual cruelty of the universe”

I have been working with lab alcohol for decades. I’ve got liters of the stuff. When we’re using it in the teaching labs I might sometimes make a feeble joke about how I don’t want to catch any of the students taking a snort, but I can tell that no one is ever tempted. It’s a fierce-smelling chemical that you’re not going to want to try.

It’s 95% alcohol, which is the same concentration as a product you can buy at the liquor store, called Everclear.

Sad to say, I have tried Everclear. My seriously, tragically, horribly alcoholic grandfather would drink the stuff, and he once gave me a sip. Just a sip! That was enough. I guess I have no taste for an industrial solvent.

Not even my grandfather would drink it straight, though. He’d add a spoonful of brown sugar to his glass.

Eww, I just shuddered involuntarily at the memory.

Fundraising, stories, and a new video

It’s true, we’re still digging out from under our legal debt and begging for donations. Check out our Fundraising page! There’s new stuff there!

Also, very importantly, Kris Wager is matching donations, up to a thousand dollars total. This is the perfect time to kick in a little bit to our our paypal account.

My contribution this time is a video about a science paper — a case study of an XY woman who gave birth to a child.

You can read the original paper right here, or a transcript of my remarks below the fold.

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Less a day’s work and $350, plus one pissed off cat…

She’s fine. The Evil Cat’s bloodwork all came back totally normal, and the vet has survived unscarred. The cat’s kind of mad at me right now, but she got doped up with a painkiller and is stumbling around drunk, so I’m safe, for now.

I have to keep an eye on her for a few days and see that she doesn’t get worse, and if she does I have to walk across town, pick up the sedative, come back, dope her up again, and then bring her back to the vet, because they don’t want to deal with the shrieking clawing hell-beast again. I don’t blame them.