Don’t call me mad. I was caught doing my thing at the Skeptiprom.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
We fetched our granddaughter Iliana from the airport today, and now we’re exhausted, and so is she. That might be understandable since we were up at 5:30am to drive to Minneapolis, and we just got home now at 7:30pm.
We have her for a week. May die.
But she’s so cute!
One of my students had to mention that we only have 13 days until classes start again.
I am not ready.
Next week, I have to get my syllabi ready and figure out this brand new courseware they’re forcing us to switch to, at the same time when my granddaughter Iliana is visiting. This is going to be impossible. Unless Ily is ready to help? She’s what, 10 months old?
Yeah, she’s ready. Looks eager, even. I’m sure she can hammer out a syllabus in no time.
This is a drone video shot in the UP of a lovely lake scene, some kayakers, and…HOLY CRAP THE CLIFF JUST COLLAPSED.
So…don’t go kayaking near the base of a cliff, it might fall on you. Don’t go hiking along the edge of a cliff, it might fall under you. Don’t go near cliffs, period, they’re evil. The midwest gets mocked a lot for being boring, but at least it’s mostly flat.
I had a terrible dream last night. I had to buy a gun, and not just any gun, but a high-powered assault rifle, to defend myself. I’d been browsing the interwebs before bed, and last thing I’d seen was this map.
How awful, I thought, that those irresponsible Wisconsonites next door are so slack in regulating their kangaroos.
So of course I dreamed of wanton kangaroos hopping across the border…wearing cheese hats and smuggling cases of LaCroix into my neighborhood. I had to shoot them.
Tonight I’m going to make a point of reading something less traumatic before bed — I’m about halfway through Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, so that should be soothing. So far, there aren’t any kangaroos in it at all. Or LaCroix.
It’s been a rough couple of years for two of our bloggers at FtB. They had colon cancer. Caine at Affinity was open about her experience, and had a public cancer journal. Iris at Death to Squirrels kept it quiet, and only a few of us knew about it — she also maintained a private account of her travails, sent by email to a few friends. The experiences of both were harrowing, both approaches were valid, although I’ve got to say even getting second-hand accounts of their treatment was terrifying, and I can’t imagine what it was like to go through it personally.
The good news is that Iris’s cancer is gone, although as you’ll discover, the second-hand effects are going to be with her for years. She’s dealing with it by explaining everything in a webcomic. It’s very good. It will make you uncomfortable. It’s art. You really should read it.
As for Caine, she gets a significant mention. I miss her, and I’ve missed Iris.
Meanwhile, here at Skepticon, the first talk of the morning is going to be from Miri Mogilevsky, who is also a cancer survivor.
Epstein apparently successfully committed suicide.
This is not justice. Right now, a lot of sick, rich fucks around the world are heaving a sigh of relief.
The guy who invented PCR has died. That’s an absolutely, utterly essential innovation that revolutionized molecular biology, but strangely, his death has gotten virtually no press. That link takes you to a newspaper that highlights the fact that he graduated from a local high school.
I guess that’s what happens when you make an important discovery, but spend the rest of your life in a drugged out haze, emerging now and then to defend astrology, or promote climate change denialism, or claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. It all just confirms that your discovery was a fortunate fluke.
Quillette published an article titled “DSA is Doomed”, written by someone named Archie Carter who claimed to have attended meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America and found them pointless, riven by dissent, full of hipsters, and counterproductive. This was exactly what Quillette wanted to hear, and they fast-tracked it for publication.
One problem: the author lived in Illinois, had never attended a New York meeting, and was making it all up.
“Tell them I live in the area of [Jacobin managing editor] Micah Uetricht,” said the playful voice on the other line. Carter — this twenty-four-year-old Illinoian’s pseudonym — had reason to be happy. He had successfully baited Quillette — the self-described “platform for free thought,” though more widely known as a platform for phrenology — with a “little Sokal experiment.”
That little aside is a good snipe, but I must correct them. They are best known as a platform for craniometry, not phrenology, although both are equally bogus.
What’s most amazing, though, is not that someone got a fake article published in a magazine, but that the original copy wasn’t juicy enough for Quillette, as disparaging as it was, so the editors of that rag jazzed it up a bit, adding new details that they invented to the story.
Comparing the original draft Carter had written (verified through a Google Doc link included in his email correspondence with Quillette), it’s clear that the publication made an extra effort to add embellishing details to the story — separate from Carter’s original fabrication — in order to advance a right-wing narrative of DSA as hopeless, dithering, anti-working class snowflakes.
For example, it was Quillette, not Carter, that included the line, “My union friends were horrified. While these people spend hours reproaching themselves and each other, real people in America are suffering.”
Quillette also suggested that DSA meetings “would drag on forever in order to accommodate the neuroses of the participants and to ensure that the proceedings observed the norms of ‘inclusivity.’”
Wow. The article has been taken down now that it was revealed that it was a hoax, but it’s revealing that not only were they soundly trolled, but they assisted in amplifying their own trolling.
Quillette is just the worst.
I’m in St Louis for Skepticon, and I am disappointed. The rooms at this hotel are huge and clean — too clean — the shower is like a pressure washer, and the location is amazing, right off the Metrolink line*, so I got here from the airport for just a few bucks, walked up to the street level, and there was the hotel, right there, and it was probably the easiest access to a conference venue ever. However…
There are no spiders anywhere in this gigantic suite. I went around with a magnifying glass to verify. It’s sterile. So I’ve donned my spider hunting gear, and am about to embark on an exploration trip to a) find some breakfast, and b) survey the environs for spiders. I have collecting vials and am not afraid to use them.
Hey, if you’re in the neighborhood, come on down! The conference is free, it’s held in the Red Lion Inn right next to the Civic Center rail stop, and it’s up on the 13th floor.
*Oh, incidentally, about the Metrolink — it’s a nice rail line direct between city center and the airport, and when I got on, I was the only white guy on the train, which is not an issue, except that at one of the stops another white guy got on, looked over the occupants, and charged over to sit next to me, like the train wasn’t half empty anyway. Not a problem, of course, except that he was staggeringly drunk, and he wanted to talk about religion with me.
Why me? Do I look like a Lutheran pastor or something?
Anyway, the conversation didn’t go far. He was so drunk he could barely talk, and he chose to lecture me on the Trinity. You know, the Father, his Son, and…Jesus’s sister? I had to just ignore him, although the bait was awfully tempting.
