And friends are organizing a casual, friendly get-together for Friday evening.

Anyone wishing to join PZ for dinner on Friday, April 6th at 7:00 p.m., please contact oniongirlsays@gmail.com ASAP to RSVP. Restaurant will be in downtown D.C., Metro and handicap accessible.

We’ll get together, have a few laughs…

I am not a hunter. I’ve never gone hunting. I don’t read hunting magazines. I’ve always taken the word of hunters that it’s a healthy, practical sport. Unfortunately, when I was at the gym this morning, someone had turned the television on the wall to one of those hunting shows, and I’d never seen one of those, either. It kind of ruined my morning.

It was a couple of people hiding in a blind near a bean field, when a large herd of deer gathered, browsing on the leftovers. They pulled out a big rifle, and boom, shot a big buck.

I was horrified to see it — the animal went frantic, galloping about the field in a clear state of terror before its legs buckled and it collapsed. As a biologist, I’ve had to kill animals before, but it’s always a process hedged about with ethical rules, and we’re careful to anesthetize the animal — it’s more that they quietly go to sleep and never wake up, and we do everything we can to minimize stress. This does not mean there are no ethical concerns — I wouldn’t find it acceptable to be killed myself, as long as it was done with no pain — but the murder methods in hunting were so brutal and even more terrible from the victim’s viewpoint.

There’s also the pragmatic dilemma. Deer must be culled. Their population is thriving under the human regime, and they’re becoming pests. Ideally, we’d have a balanced environment with predators that would keep the population in check…but a wolf kill is even more brutal and cruel than shooting.

What bugged me most, though, was the reaction of the hunters: fist-pumping, grinning, cheering, pridefully standing over the corpse. As I said, I’ve killed uncounted mice, lots of rabbits and cats and a few dogs and a few larger animals for research, but I never got used to it, I never celebrated their death, I regretted it. Hundreds (or more) dead animals, and I never became so inured that I could do it casually, and I certainly never smiled and laughed as I infused some helpless animal with a barbiturate overdose. Of course, I still recognize the problem with even my attitude.

Need a philosopher and ethicist, stat. I am very uncomfortable now.

Oh, Michigan State. You just knew the nightmare wouldn’t be over when Larry Nassar was sentenced. He wasn’t molesting young women in his basement torture room — he was doing it in the public facilities of a public institution while getting paid for his services. There had to be enablers and people who turned a blind eye to it all, and maybe even some people who were doing similar things.

Now that shoe has dropped. William Strampel has been arrested.

The former dean of Michigan State University’s school of osteopathic medicine sexually assaulted and harassed four female students, and also mishandled a 2014 complaint that Larry Nassar sexually assaulted a patient, allowing further abuses by the disgraced former Olympic gymnastics physician to occur, according to criminal charges unsealed in Michigan Tuesday morning.

It sounds like he let Nassar skate by with neglect and also indulged in a bit of slimy fondling on his own.

In March 2017, Strampel told a Michigan State police officer and an FBI agent that he never followed up to ensure Nassar was adhering to the 2014 protocols, nor did he tell anyone else in the office about them, because these were “common sense” guidelines and the Title IX investigation had ultimately cleared Nassar.

The two misdemeanors are punishable by up to two years in prison and $500 in fines, according to court documents.

Strampel’s other charges — felony misconduct of a public official, punishable by up to 5 years in prison and $10,000 in fines, and misdemeanor criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to 2 years in prison and $500 in fines — stem from a pattern of discriminatory behavior described by four former female students.

So he’s looking at, potentially, a couple of years in prison, which given his age (70) is serious stuff. And what a capstone to a long career as a distinguished medical school administrator!

At least it sounds like Michigan State is serious about cleaning house.

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By the way, Strampel seems to have been quite the dirty old man. Here’s the criminal complaint, and one example.

In 2013, her third year of medical school, V-2 again met with Strampel, this time to address complaints she had about her surgical residency at a local hospital. Once again, as soon as she entered his office, he directed her to slowly turn around twice so he could look at her body. Strampel advised her that she needed to learn her place in life and asked her, “what do I have to do to teach you to be submissive and subordinate to men?”

Ugh.

Some of them have to disappoint you. Three young women visiting Italy decided to try their hand at cooking, apparently for the first time ever.

According to Italian newspaper La Nazione, three 20-year-olds bought some pasta and took it back to their apartment in Florence, with high hopes for an authentic Italian dinner. But instead of boiling several quarts of water before adding the pasta—you know, step one on every set of back-of-the-box instructions ever—they emptied the dry noodles directly into the pot. (Sigh…)

Because spaghetti isn’t meant to be seared, it caught on fire immediately. And because people who don’t understand how to fix pasta also don’t know what to do with stovetop flames, the students had to call the fire department.

I…I mean…they can’t…OK, words fail me. How can you reach the age of 20 and not understand that pasta needs water? These are college students, they must have at least been exposed to ramen, right?

But for every act of ignorance, there must be a graceful response. The Italian reaction makes me happy.

“As a generation and as a Florentine, I feel guilty, I feel there was a strong communication deficit on the part of this city”. The patron of Cibréo and C.BIO Fabio Picchi said so. “What have we transmitted to these girls who came here to study and in a moment of rest they tried to become the most typical dish of our gastronomic culture?”. The girls justified themselves: “we put the pasta on the fire without the water, we thought it was cooked like that”. Does it make you smile? “In fact – says Picchi – there is little to laugh about. It ‘s too easy to make the joke. Instead we must reflect: why did something like this happen with the Italian dish par excellence? “Did we show the world too many fireworks?” It may be – concludes Fabio Picchi. And it is for this reason that I decided to give 4 hours of Italian cooking lessons for free to the three American girls protagonists of the fact. Together with two of my extraordinary cooks will have lunch in our restaurant. Meanwhile they will teach them the simple basics that if well done are very good. I think this can be useful to them, but also to us. Understanding is always – with simplicity and cognition – what is beautiful and necessary “.

Magnifico!

I saw A Wrinkle in Time last night. My wife enjoyed it.

I hated it. Hated the whole thing. If I’d been alone, I’d have just walked out on it.

Things just happened in the plot, which made no logical sense. There was no feeling of consistency or reason to this universe, the writers had a whim and made it happen on the screen. There was all this New Age crap throughout — yeah, there was “quantum”, and there was “vibration”, and wouldn’t you know it, the secret ingredient that made it possible for Chris Pine to teleport (oh, excuse me, “tesser”) 91 billion light years to a conveniently habitable planet was the “vibration of love”.

Worst movie I’ve seen this year. Go ahead, fight me.

It’s coming out on 26 March, and the book was appalling dreck. The only question is whether the movie will improve on the source material somehow, and be at best a direct-to-dvd crapfest, or whether it will wallow in the bizarre 80s obsession and be a Star Wars Christmas special for millennials. I’m going guess the latter.

Yes, I know, some of you will tell me that you loved the book. Don’t care. It was a one-shot special purpose stimulator for geek/nerd pleasure centers, and I’m sure it was like a hit of cocaine for some of you. It was, however, an objectively bad book.

Here’s another example of its flaws that initially sailed right past me, because I didn’t care for much of any of 1980s cartoons built around toys, or Knight Rider, or the A Team, and even the stuff I did enjoy at the time, like E.T. and The Goonies, weren’t well captured by the book, except as fleeting references that I was supposed to adore. “Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a circle jerk of male geek culture sustained over a grueling 400 pages.” Yeah, it’s a stroll through the Not-Pink Aisle at Toys’R’Us.

That why everything from Transformers to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can get reimagined with CGI reverence — but the idea of a blockbuster live-action American Girl Dolls or The Powerpuff Girls franchise sounds laughable.

Hey! I really liked the Powerpuff Girls! They were much better than He-Man, which my kids just ate up.

Here’s an amusing riff on the built-in bias: Jenny Nicholson reads from an imaginary Ready Player One…For Girls. It’s just like the version for boys! Bad!

Student evaluations suck, mostly.

Imagine that you’re up for a promotion at your job, but before your superior decides whether you deserve it, you have to submit the comments section of an internet article that was written about you for assessment.

Sound a little absurd?

That’s in essence what we ask professors in higher education to do when they submit their teaching evaluations in their tenure and promotion portfolios. At the end of each semester, students are asked to fill out an evaluation of their professor. Typically, they are asked both to rate their professors on an ordinal scale (think 1­–5, 5 being highest) and provide written comments about their experience in the course.

We’ve repeatedly seen studies that show that student evaluations are skewed to favor popularity and attractiveness of the professor (damn, I lose), and this article points out that there is a gender bias as well: male professors tend to get higher ratings than female professors (so that’s how I’ve managed to get along), and that means these evaluations are discriminatory. And therefore illegal. Cool.

Now I said that student evals suck, mostly. They’re sometimes helpful — not the goofy numerical scores, and I ignore comments that whine about how hard the class is — but the productive, thoughtful comments can be very helpful. If a student says “X worked for me, Y didn’t”, I’ll seriously reconsider X and Y.

The last batch of evaluations I got back I just ignored the numerical scores and browsed through the comments for practical concerns. I got one: there’s a lot of grade anxiety out there, and they really wanted the gradebook available online, so they could see exactly where they stand, point by point. OK, I can do that. Not with our existing software, Moodle, in which the gradebook is a confusing nightmare, but we’re switching to new courseware next year, so I’ll look into it.

I guess it’s good that that was the biggest problem they had with the course. But it’s the stupid numbers that the administration will care about.

There’s been another school shooting, this time in Maryland.

Domestic terrorists are blowing people up in Texas, initially targeting black people, but now progressing to random explosions.

Our government will do nothing.

Situation normal. This is America now.