Venting!

This year is trying to kill my interest in teaching. My work load has basically doubled, since I’m splitting up all my labs into multiple sub-sections to meet the isolation guidelines, and I’m also struggling to provide accommodations to all the students in difficult circumstances (which I need to do, and is part of the job), and my reward is that a) teaching involves trying to engage mute little black squares on a computer screen, and b) the administration occasionally mumbles about trying to find a way to cut my pay, while telling me gosh, what a wonderful job I’m doing. And then telling me we should prepare to continue the pandemic protocols next fall, and that we don’t have any access to a vaccine, and aren’t even remotely in the queue. Right now I’m staring into a growing bleak darkness that is my future. I don’t even have the joy of spidering right now — it’s -35 degrees C out there!

If my first year as a full time teaching professor (1990, but who is counting) had been like this, I’d be working in a software company right now, coding. I coulda been, but I liked students…you know, those entities who are now little black squares on a screen.

At least I can still scream into the glowing pixels of the void before me.

Fly Time was a bust

That was agonizing. My students have projects ongoing, so I leave the lab open so they can get in and work with their flies. I go in early in the morning specifically to unlock it.

Someone locked it back up again after I left!

Students were backed up, trying to get in, and were frantically phoning and messaging me!

While I was trying to teach my other class!

It was agonizing: non-stop ringing and beeping while I’m trying to deliver a lecture, and it wasn’t so much that the noise bothered me, but that I couldn’t just ditch one class to help another, and so I couldn’t answer or do anything about it. I finally broke down and ran into the other room to ask my long-suffering wife to take my keys and unlock it for them. I’ve now posted prominent signs telling people not to lock it during class hours.

I guess I should be grateful for diligent staff who maintain our security, and for eager, ambitious students, but wow was that a stressful class hour.

(For that matter, this pandemic has already pushed my stress levels off the charts.)

I also suspect cartoonists are trying to torture me

This one lured me in with the title “Cave of the Mega-Spider”, and the first shot is of a big toothy dinosaur. OK, this is acceptable. Then said dinosaur tears open a spider silk blob…and there’s a dead, dessicated hominid inside? What the heck? Anachronism! Then the giant fanged mega-spider makes an appearance, and it’s kind of awesome, until it opens it’s mouth, vertebrate-style with mandibles, and starts hosing the dinosaur down with silk from the spinneret — in its throat. I cannot enjoy this anymore. I am offended.

Oh joy, first exam

This week, I gave my first exam of the semester — a take-home, with ten multi-part questions requiring lots of calculations and and statistical tests, and I required that all answers by typed and in a specific format. It was due last night at midnight.

Nobody took the hint. I got 100% on-time submissions, so this morning I’m looking at a big stack of pages of numbers and formulas and explanations and hard work that I have to get evaluated this weekend.

Why didn’t you guys tell me to make it all multiple choice and true/false? I’m blaming you all. You need to come to my house and grade them for me.

Coulda been “Starlords”

I shouldn’t have laughed at the Space Force naming themselves “Guardians”. It turns out they requested submissions and we had a boaty-mcboatface situation. Take a look at the list if you’re looking for a laugh.

They could have been “Galaxians”, or “Celestians”, or “Trekkies”, or “Geeks”, or “Loonies”, or “Homo spaciens”, or “Wookies”, or “Stormtroopers”.

You know what? They were all silly. No matter what they choose, they were going to look ridiculous.

My sister-in-law, Julie Lynn Myers

She was an awesomely nice person.

Obituary
Loving wife, mother, sister, and friend Julie Lynn (Bjornsson) Myers passed away Friday, January 29, 2021 at her home in Hoquiam, WA, she was 59 years old. Julie was born August 31, 1961 to Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson in Ballard, WA
Growing up Julie lived most of her life in Ballard but also spent some time in Tacoma, WA. She graduated from high school then went on to continue her education at University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University earning her master’s degree. After earning her degree Julie held many jobs in the health care field as a project manager.
Later in life Julie met the love of her life James Myers and they later married, and both moved to Hoquiam in July 2015. Julie was an incredibly involved member of the Peace Corp in Samoa as well as the Pierce County Democrats and would faithfully attend services at the Ocean Shores Lutheran Church. She also has many hobbies such as traveling, hiking, sewing, and volunteering at the North Beach Paws.
Julie is survived by her husband James Myers of Hoquiam, WA; stepsons Charlie Myers of Bellingham, WA and Evan Myers of Rogers, AR; stepdaughter Rachael Hahn of McCleary, WA; brother Doug Bjornsson of Tacoma, WA; sister Margo Bjornsson of Ballard, WA; as well as her grandson Alexander Hahn. She is preceded in death by her parents Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson. All who knew Julie loved her and enjoyed her company.
Arrangements are entrusted to Harrison Family Mortuary of Aberdeen. To share memories or to sign the online guestbook please visit www.harrisonfamilymortuary.com.

The lab look

I’ve been in lab all afternoon, this section finished up ten minutes early. So in case you’ve wondered, this is how I face my students nowadays.

It’s kind of offputting, but then, the students are all wearing masks, too.

Please, can we end the pandemic soon? I don’t much care for trying to teach while looking like a mysterious spaceman.

Shut up, Jordan Peterson

Can he just go away now? He’s in the news again because the Sunday Times has published an interview with him…which I haven’t read since it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the teaser:

Ithought this was going to be a normal interview with Jordan Peterson. After speaking with him at length, and with his daughter for even longer, I no longer have any idea what it is. I don’t know if this is a story about drug dependency, or doctors, or Peterson family dynamics — or a parable about toxic masculinity. Whatever else it is, it’s very strange.

It sounds like it’s an accurate description of how weird the Peterson family is, but obviously, Peterson disagrees and thinks the published interview grossly distorts the truth. I don’t know, not having read it; maybe it’s horribly biased, maybe it mangles the whole story, I just don’t care, but I can appreciate that Peterson would want to correct the record, if so. So Peterson chose to release the complete transcript of the interview.

If he thinks that makes him look normal, oh man, the Times article must be a rip-roaring phantasmagoria of bizarreness, because yikes, the transcript is freaky. His daughter, Mikhaila, is very much an enabler of his delusions. For instance, he really goes on and on about his diet obsessions.

Jordan 16:15
When I talked to Sam Harris- it’s very complicated, and I’m still trying to piece all of this together, but I had gone to see my family, my extended family on my wife’s side, and Mikhaila and her husband, and me, both- all of us came down with the same symptom set that lasted about three weeks, and it was absolutely terrible. I couldn’t get up without fainting. I’d faint, fall to the floor, gray out, not blackout completely, but gray out every time I got up. I couldn’t get warm. I was wearing multiple layers of clothes and multiple layers of blankets, and I couldn’t get warm. I had an overwhelming sense of doom and anxiety, and I didn’t want to move, and plus I couldn’t sleep for days and days. I don’t- I was without sleep for many weeks. And you know-

Interviewer 17:17
And this was from inadvertently ingesting apple cider?

Jordan 17:22
Look, that’s- that’s-

Mikhaila 17:24
It wasn’t. No. Hold on.

Jordan 17:26
There were, no doubt, multiple-

Mikhaila 17:28
Hold up. It wasn’t apple cider. It was sodium metabisulfite in apple cider. Like the alcoholic apple cider was added to a stew.

Interviewer 17:40
Understood.

Mikhaila 17:40
So it was sodium metabisulfite in that apple cider, but it wasn’t apple cider.

He was sick. He had problems. I can’t deny that. But the idea that one sip of sodium metabisulfite sent his life spiraling into catastrophe is unlikely.

Apparently he was a total wreck, but he was swiftly cured by his all-meat diet. This guy sounds exactly like one of those gullible tools promoting snake oil.

Jordan 22:09
Yes. And the diet did a lot of different things, had a lot of different effects on me. One of the most market effects immediately was that I stopped snoring, and that happened within a week. It was very, very surprising to me. And then I had psoriasis and that cleared up, and I had gum disease, and that cleared up which is- that’s not curable, gum disease, so it’s treatable, but not curable, but it’s completely cleared up. And I lost 70 pounds over about a seven month period. So the transformation was remarkable. And I’ve had other autoimmune symptoms in my life. I had alopecia areata at one point and thought I was going to lose all my hair, but luckily that stopped. And I had this condition called peripheral uveitis, which is an inflammation in the tissue of the eye, and markers on my fingernails for autoimmune- like an autoimmune condition, your body attacks its own cells, and I had markers for that as well. And I have had a lengthy history of mouth ulcers…

I suspect the Times committed the unforgivable crime of editing his words and trying to make the Peterson family interesting, because oh my god, it was the most boring thing ever. It’s an old man whining about his multitude of illnesses, with his quack of a daughter chiming in now and then with comments about how she, lacking all medical training, had diagnosed him and cured him with her magic diet. It’s stultifyingly stupid and uninteresting and morbidly bizarre. He does talk at one point about how the political left and right are exactly the same, and that what’s ripping the US apart is the feedback that keeps them swinging madly back and forth…I just wanted to yell “PROJECTION!” at the screen, because there is clearly some kind of pathological hypochondriac dynamic going on in his family that is pushing him back and forth.

But mainly, it’s agonizingly boring. I imagine the reporter struggled to extract anything at all interesting from it. Apparently, the Times reported that he’s a schizophrenic weirdo, to which Mikhaila just says nah, he was akathisic (akathisia is mentioned 91 times in the interview!) — but no one is going to confuse akathesia with schozophrenia, except maybe that colossal ignoramus, Mikhaila. All I can think is…

Shut up, Jordan Peterson, you meandering mumbling old git.