oh god oh god oh god

Classes start tomorrow. I’m looking at my pile of notes and lecture material and plans and thinking, “I’ve got this,” like I do every year, but now I have to do everything over Zoom, which is a real monkey wrench in the proceedings, and I’ve got the specter of disease and death hovering overhead, and who knows, maybe a political coup coming up midsemester, with forces in government working to destroy my profession, and I have to sit through a great long division meeting this morning where we’ll all pretend everything is normal and hear administrators go “wah wah, wa-wa wah wah” because I won’t be able to parse what they’re saying, and I’m going to be trying to finish up my syllabus with Zoom acting as little more than a distraction interfering with getting my actual WORK done, and cops are killing people and other people are gasping out their life on respirators while I’m merely suffering acute anxiety as the world burns, but hey, the flames will get to me soon enough to bring sweet oblivion and no one will care because there are more important things than a story about an old guy’s heart exploding and brain liquifying in an isolated office in the middle of midwestern farmland, so now I’m wondering if my headphones will stopper up my ears enough to prevent the brain goo from dribbling out and making a mess on the carpet.

That’s my workday ahead. How’s yours?

Well, that was quick

UNC opened for in-person instruction just one week ago; they have announced now that they are switching to entirely online instruction.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university.

They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, they said.

What kind of magical, miraculous prophet could have foreseen such an outcome?

I mean, even with that example right in front of our face, no one could possibly predict that all the other universities that are the process of opening up might anticipate a similar result.

I really hope none of those students comes down with a serious case of COVID-19 with long-term consequences. Is UNC prepared to handle the moral and economic effects of that?

Hey, is the University of Minnesota ready?

An appropriate response from the UNC student paper.

Morris is Panic City today

At least for me. The students are back and lurking in the dorms. I have a Zoom meeting with advisees today. Classes start on Wednesday. Everything is Officially No Fun for a while.

Besides the usual fretting over getting courses up and running, now we have the added fun of waiting for the first coronavirus case to show up, and seeing how the university deals with it. At least we have the advantage of seeing other universities’ experience. UNC, for instance, has been open for one week and already has four clusters of cases in student housing.

We’re really opening, huh?

I’ve been doing Instagram wrong

I can look at what I post that people like, and it’s discouraging. So I posted this photo of a spider and her two egg sacs a few days ago, and it has been rewarded with 16 ♥, which is about par for the course. Then late last night, I threw in this quick view of me and Mary standing in a grassy field and…111 ♥ already? What?

I guess everyone prefers pictures of Mary to spiders. I’m going to have to switch to taking nothing but photos of the Instagram model I married in order to become a rich and famous influencer.

Except she doesn’t like to be photographed. Oh well, back to the “trying desperately to make spiders a thing” grind.

Minnesota does not have a mask mandate

We say we do. Governor Walz made a proclamation that everyone is required to wear masks indoor in public places. Everyone ignores it. It’s a lie.

I just got back from Alexandria, and I’m pissed off. We drive 40 minutes away to get our groceries because our local grocery store, Willie’s, is a plague pit that does not enforce the rule, but we walked into that Aldi after our drive and just turned around and left again. A young woman was ahead of us, no mask, with two young kids running around maskless. There was also an older couple, too: the woman was wearing a mask, but her asshole husband had his mask pulled down around his neck. There were two young dudes exiting…no masks. Hell no, I’m worried enough about a flood of students coming in next week without this anxiety, so we were gone.

This is madness. Our county has been quiet for a long time — I’ve been watching the stats for a while, and it was boring because Stevens County just hovered around 2, 3, 4 cases for the longest time. It’s at 22 now, suddenly. We need to take this stuff seriously.

You have two things to look forward to this weekend

It’ll be my last weekend before classes come crashing down on my head, so I’m going to take advantage of it.

Skepticon starts tomorrow! Tune in!

I’m looking forward to this as well: Lovecraft Country airs on Sunday!

It’s a great book, and it looks like HBO is doing right by it. There’s a write-up in the LA Times about that horrible racist, HP Lovecraft, and why he is surprisingly popular.

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

“He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.”

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

I intensely dislike dishonest presentations of data

One could make the point that there’s an interesting and sort of natural experiment going on here: two adjacent countries with strong cultural similarities but different approaches to health care are addressing the pandemic, and spontaneously generating lots of data we could use to evaluate their methodologies. But this illustration isn’t it:

Oh, look. The US is a smear of red. Canada just has a few dots…but wait. Those dots look like they correspond to the approximate centers of Canadian provinces. Are we seriously supposed to compare a coarse province-level aggregation of data to what looks like a finer-grained county level visualization of US cases? That’s highly misleading. It may be that Canada has managed the pandemic better than the US, but you can’t assess that from such a bad map. For shame, whoever made that.