You know what I like about Twitter? Everyone lets it all hang out. It’s humanity without the filters, where people say precisely what’s on their minds without trying to second-guess whether it might offend someone. And it reveals the ugly truth: a lot of people actually are world-class assholes.

Take the announcement that Harriet Tubman will be honored on the $20 bill. As expected, some people on Twitter are raging over it. Cynics, rejoice: the ugliness of humanity is on naked display in one easily accessible place. I mean, look at this:

That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t normally see outside of Twitter, or a Ku Klux Klan rally, or Thanksgiving with your relatives, or some such similar venue outside the bounds of civilized society.

Here’s another example. I am not a sports fan, but even I have heard of Curt Schilling, but not because of baseball — it’s because he’s an astonishingly ignorant jerk on Twitter. He’s a creationist, he’s a homophobe, he’s simply a disgraceful human being. Without Twitter, though, people might still think of him as a guy who was really skilled at playing with a ball and stick. But no, he happily exposed the rotting, maggot-filled black pudding that constitutes his brain to everyone, and now ESPN has fired him. ESPN has never been at all coherent on their policies on these things — they suspend contributors over far more trivial offenses than Curt Schilling routinely committed — but he made some sneering transphobic comment about bathrooms that finally was enough, and the just plain fired him. About time.

So he wasn’t humane enough for a sports network, but you’ll be pleased to know that he still has his Twitter account, where he’s currently representing Christianity and weeping over his martyrdom. Twitter has no expectations of decorum or intelligence.

I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — I’ve found it useful, and I’ve found several books that have been helpful. I downloaded a couple of camera tutorials, for instance, that were straightforward and direct and coupled practice and concept very nicely (for example, this one by Al Judge) that explained apertures and f/stops well (I already understood the concepts) by showing me how they were implemented in my camera.

Unfortunately, Kindle Unlimited turns out to be extremely exploitable, and there are scammers taking advantage of it. Follow that link for all the details, but the short summary is that a) all authors divvy up a pot of money from KU subscribers, b) the author’s share of the pot is determined by how many of their pages are “read”, c) Amazon has an awesomely stupid algorithm for measuring pages read, so that if someone downloads the book and just zips to the last page, the author is credited for the whole book read, d) so people are creating garbage books and getting co-conspirators to download it for free and jump to the end.

Would you believe people can earn $60,000/month with this game? I am not endorsing this. Do not leap into the action thinking you can make some quick bucks fast. It’s unethical, and at some point, I hope, Amazon will wake up and crack down on these thieves, at which point it will hurt the perpetrators.

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We all remember this event, in which policeman John Pike casually hoses down students at UC Davis with pepper spray. Not only is it memorable, but if you google “UC Davis” the story is going to pop up on the first page of results.

The administrators at UC Davis are a bit touchy about the whole incident and wanted to do something about it. So what did they do? They hired one of those shady ‘reputation management’ companies to somehow expunge the story and image from search results, at a cost of at least $175,000. Those things never work, and you’re a fool to try them.

Except…maybe they did accomplish something.

Now when you search for UC Davis, the first results are all about the university’s dodgy, clumsy, ill-planned, and wasteful attempt to whitewash their reputation.

The lesson you should learn is that trying to cover up your sins with worthless SEO is going to only change your search results to a) remind everyone of the bad thing you did, and b) let them know that you’re desperate to cover it up.

Good work, administrators at UC Davis! You’re working hard to further stain the reputation of a very good school.

Gay Talese said some stupid things lately, especially that he was never inspired by women journalists, but we’re not supposed to throw him under the bus, because he’s old, and he has written some good stuff. Both statements are true, although it’s not clear how these passes give anyone an out, or much more importantly, when you get them. Is this like the discount you get at the Sizzler for having an AARP card? You’re over 50, so you get 10% off the all-you-can-disgorge gaffe buffet?

But I agree, he should not be thrown under the bus for not reading or enjoying women writers. I suspect he was just being honest — he doesn’t. Was he supposed to lie and say he loved Diablo Cody and Lena Dunham? No! He’s a man of a certain age, uninfluenced by women’s words, and that is who he is.

Although, we might suggest that exploring the wider world of human experience might have been good for him, given his other remarkable publication lately. He’s written a story called “The Voyeur’s Motel”, and it is very well written — you’ll read the whole thing. The one problem is that there is an absence of humanity at its center. It’s as if the person writing it had so mastered the motions of clinical objectivity that he could calmly watch and participate in gross ethical violations of other people’s privacy because he was following a higher calling, the crystal clear rules of journalism, and could then dispassionately describe these activities as just things that happened. A sequence of events. Nothing more.

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Vox Day started to make a list of all SJWs — he calls it a complete catalog. Well, good, I thought, it could be handy to know who all the decent people are. Unfortunately, it’s very short, so I think he’s missing a lot of people, and also, weirdly, it includes people like Ben Shapiro, far right fanatic and former editor at Breitbart.

So it’s more of a list of people Vox Day doesn’t like.

It is kind of a strange obsession that some of the worst people on the internet have, of maintaining Enemies Lists and threatening to put people on it if they get out of line, as if anyone has ever been intimidated by such a fate, and as if being put on a List was significant. Anyone remember the List Lord of Talk.Origins, Peter Nyikos? I think I was on a few of his Lists. It was mainly good for a laugh.

Solemn greetings, all. Today, as the more reverent among you know, is Paul Nelson Day. Today is the 12th annual feast day of St Nelson, patron saint of obtusity and procrastination, and we honor his contributions to science by…well, by not doing much of anything at all. You could make grandiose claims today and promise to make good on them tomorrow, a tomorrow that stretches out into a decade or more, I suppose, but that’s too much work. Instead, maybe we should all just shrug and say we’ll think about celebrating later.

Oh, jeez, shrugging? I don’t have time for that. How about if we don’t and just say we did.

I also thought about suggesting waffles as the perfect food for this day, but nah, I’d have to cook them, or go to a restaurant. I’m just going to say “waffles!” and put it off to some other day.

Anyway, if you don’t know the story, Paul Nelson is a creationist who attended the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, with a poster in which he claimed to have developed this new evo-devoish parameter, Ontogenetic Depth, that supposedly measured the difficulty of developmental complexity to evolve. I quizzed him on it, and specifically asked him to explain how I could measure it in my zebrafish, for example, and he couldn’t tell me, even though he seemed to be saying that he and a student had been doing these ‘measurements’. But he promised to send me a paper he was working on that explained it all. Tomorrow! A tomorrow that never came.

So now we remind him of his failure every year. It’s a good thing to point out to Intelligent Design creationists that they don’t seem to be very good at fulfilling their grand promises.

He seems to sometimes notice that he’s being mocked, at least. Last year, he tried to trot out Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which was just as impractical and ill-conceived as the first non-existent version. Maybe he’ll have a new beta for us this year, too?

Unlikely. Too much work. Not in the spirit of the day.

Now you can Powerpuff yourself! Unfortunately, there is no Mojo JoJo option, so this will have to do.

The resemblance is uncanny.