I’ll never be able to read Gay Talese without shuddering ever again

creepypeeper

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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I thought this was going to be a useful list

Vox-Day

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.

It’s Paul Nelson Day, again

wafflehouse

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.

Brain done

Today, I…

  • Spent half a class hour working step by step through a cunningly clever linkage problem that most of my students didn’t get…

  • Spent the rest of the hour trying to explain imprinting, slowly and carefully, with diagrams, and left everyone looking like they’d been pole-axed…

  • Tried to race through Beadle-Tatum, Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick, and Meselson-Stahl (at an introductory level) in the next class.

My head hurts. Need a nap. A civilized country would put naptime in our schedules.

Oh, yeah, Stephen Hsu responded to me, too, and man, ignorance makes my brain hurt even more. I’ll reply to that later.

I’d say “after my nap,” but I have committee meetings to attend instead.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a fraud

Shocking. It turns out that Milo Yiannopoulos is ghost-written. Everywhere. He’s got interns writing his articles, his talks…I wonder if he’s so lazy that he’s got them writing his tweets.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has about 44 interns — a mix of paid and unpaid — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

Two people write Breitbart stuff for me, he told BuzzFeed News, but ghostwriting is too great a word. [Nope. Ghostwriting is exactly the word. –pzm] He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. I have two books coming out this year, he said. It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.

A career like his…what career? He is, supposedly, a writer. What he does for a career is write stuff. He doesn’t have any other job. His wikipedia page identifies him as a journalist. He’s employed at Breitbart as their tech journalist — he doesn’t know much about “tech”, but I guess he’s as qualified to be labeled that as “journalist”.

You know, if he were calling himself an astronaut, and it turned out that the only people to step into a rocket were his paid staff and volunteers, It would be fair to call him out on that phoniness. If he said he was a movie star, but had a team of proxies who were doing all his acting for him, I’d wonder why anyone needed him at all. He’s got about as much of a career as a Kardashian, apparently, famous for being famous rather than talented, and mainly his job is posting selfies and preening.

And 44 interns? That’s ludicrous. What is there left for him to do after 44 people have written his text, edited his words, done all the labor of writing?

Worst of all, he’s outsourcing his writing to…goons from 4chan. That explains a lot, actually.

If I ever get this cranky, just shoot me

crankyclintYou may recall Ted Storck from his greatest hits here in Morris: he’s the guy who donated the chimes that annoyed everyone for years, who wrote bitter letters to the local newspaper when asked to turn them down, who complained when a vandal cut the wires (OK, that was wrong to do, but he also accused me of having done it), who, when the chimes were finally silenced by the city council, whined about how he should never do anything nice for the community, before stomping off to his retirement in Arizona.

I thought we were done with crotchety ol’ Ted — the chimes are gone, he’s moved away — but no! He’s taken to writing cranky letters to the local newspaper, about things that have annoyed him. And the paper is publishing them! Ah, Morris.

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