Last night was a bad night — I’m feeling rather battered and my face is sore. Where did they insert that endoscope again? Oh, right, there were some minor problems with anesthesia so I got manhandled a bit while unconscious. I’m feeling it. Bottom half is doing great, but the top half, back and face, were run through a mangler. The aches are already easing up, though, so I’m not worried about it.

I was also advised to go gently on meals, despite being ravenous. I was a good boy yesterday, so it was nothing but soup and toast. There are still strange rumblings and squelchy noises coming out of my guts, so that was a wise decision, but today I surrendered to my hunger and started the day with a mushroom omelette and giant cup of coffee. That should help.

Feeling better already, except…the university has begun its ominous slouch towards opening. Yesterday was the official opening convocation, which I missed for obvious reasons, but today begins with a two hour division meeting (we’re going to talk about budgets and assessment and other such minutiæ ; strangely, there is nothing on the agenda about the pandemic challenges we have to face), followed by a one hour biology discipline meeting, followed by me having to spend some time finishing the genetics lab cleanup so the next lab class can move in for the Fall.

Then I’d better get those class syllabi out to the students. I meet with my new advisees on Monday. They better be wearing masks!

So far, it looks like this school year is starting with an assumption of total normalcy, while ominous horror-movie music has begun rising in my head, and I just know we’re going to reach a crescendo with screeching violins next month. No way am I going to split up and go into the basement in the coming month.

I’m dreaming of Halloween in August: cool weather, a nice frost, creepy things crawling out of the falling foliage, and me, appearing in a Patron Q&A. If you joined my Patreon account, you could even appear in the video with me. If not, you’ll have to settle for watching, or leaving questions in the comments, or asking them in the chat on Sunday.

Also, don’t forget Skepticon the 13th this weekend!

1930s, 2020s, it’s all the same number if you’re innumerate enough.

Don’t laugh too hard. I’ve been wallowing in despair and stress for a year, and it’s not good for me, so I thought I’d try to force myself to say good things about my self. Think Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” except I don’t go so far as to claim people like me — I’ve got to be realistic in my affirmations.

Anyway, I had to spend some time in some tedious light microscope work, so I just started babbling at the camera while poking at baby spiders with a paintbrush and forceps.

Joe Rogan is probably the most popular “news” source on the internet right now, but goddamn, it would be nice if the popular sources actually knew anything. Thanks, YouTube, your algorithm is one of the primary enablers of evil in America.

His latest inanity, the latest among many, is that he is spreading COVID misinformation.

Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below [Nah, I’m not including a Rogan video here–pzm]. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.

“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He’s taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”

Right. Rogan claimed that vaccinated people were a reservoir of variation in the human population. This is not true, as the author of the scientific paper plainly says.

“Evolution, at the moment, is all happening in the unvaccinated. That’s where the majority of cases are. That’s the majority of transmission. Every time a virus replicates, it can mutate. So the evolution is, right now, occurring in the body of people who are not vaccinated. Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else.”

If you were to listen to Rogan’s video, you’d see it’s one meathead having a conversation with another nobody, misrepresenting the work but claiming that he has a scientific paper proving his point (it doesn’t) while complaining that you have to get vaccinated to hang out in a bar, followed by a lot of conspiracy theory bullshit. That’s the discourse. This is where we’re at, the state of public science communication of significant information is now in the hands of assholes.

Speaking of assholes and misinformation, have you ever heard of Tim Pool? He’s big. He’s making millions of dollars off YouTube programming and biased lying to the public. The Daily Beast just posted a lengthy exposé on Pool.

…Pool has discovered a style of commentary and audience where a lack of knowledge or journalistic skills might not prove an impediment to success. In some ways, incuriosity and incapacity serve as valuable attributes in this medium. Not solely because of the political valence but thanks in part to how YouTube itself functions: rewarding the kind of high-volume, sensationalized, and sloppy churn Pool specializes in.

And it has made Pool both exceedingly rich and one of the most-watched independent YouTube political pundits in the country—over 3.3 million subscribers, 1.5 billion views, and, by all estimates, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month. He earned $600,000 just in August 2020 and “most of it” came from YouTube, Pool claimed in the recorded conversation.

It’s stunning that that much money is cheerfully forked over to an incompetent grifter by YouTube and Google. You’d think somebody at those companies would look up and notice that they’re enabling some of the worst journalism on the planet, and that maybe they ought to adjust their algorithm to disable its bias in favor of screeching sensationalist jerks. We’ve long been plagued with tabloid-style yellow journalism, but somehow YouTube has figured out a recipe for turning it into even more money.

At the same time, though, some people manage to produce excellent content on YouTube, which will never be rewarded as profligately as the garbage Tim Pool or Joe Rogan churns out. For example, here’s a beautifully detailed dissection of Tim Pool — it’s worth listening to the whole thing, if you have the patience. I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the creator starts by praising Pool’s goals and claims, and I started thinking that this might be a puff piece by a fan…but never fear, as he continues, he carefully shows how everything Pool says is a self-aggrandizing lie by a lazy pseudojournalist. It’s a thoroughly damning analysis.

Give all of Tim Pool’s money to that guy. It’s too bad they won’t, because sensationalist lying and crazy conspiracy theories bring more views and advertising dollars.