Not the best way to endear oneself to SF fans

They incinerated Uhura and Scotty!

Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke’s ashes were on board a private US lunar lander that, after a failed moonshot, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Friday and burned-up on the way down. The intention had been to leave the ashes, among those from around 70 individuals including actors James Doohan (aka Scotty) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), on the moon’s surface following a successful landing. Rodenberry’s ashes have previously been a part of other space missions.

Don’t worry — they were pre-incinerated. It was a PR stunt in the first place. Celestis, the company playing this game, launches one gram of cremains from a person willing to pay the price of $13,000 to splat a little bit of ash on the Moon (Bonus! Send 3 grams for only $26,000!). One of the bonuses of this grift is that they can launch bits of individuals in multiple expensive missions, like Gene Rodenberry’s. The poor guy’s ashes seem to be a staple to send in tiny doses to outer space.

Although to put the whole enterprise into the proper context of dignity and reverence, also lost on this failed mission was a sample of a powdered soft drink. Yes, a tiny bit of Arthur C. Clarke was mixed with a bit of Kool-Aid, set on fire, and spewed into the atmosphere. Breathe deep!

I hope it was cherry flavored author, that’s my favorite.

No matter what, he still fails any test for common decency

Trump is still bragging about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test — you know, that Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. bullshit he announced as a validation of his brilliance a while back. Only it’s not, and has never been, any kind of intelligence test. And worse, he gets it wrong, he had forgotten the words and order the day of the test, and in every retelling since he is changing the words and exaggerating the difficulty of the test. Now he claims that was asked to multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3. Not only do I not believe it, I doubt that he could solve it himself.

But he almost certainly wasn’t asked to repeat Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

But, much like the phantom whale, Nasreddine said the words in the cognitive testing sequence are supposed to be unrelated, so the MoCA would never have a pair of connected words like “woman” and “man,” or “camera” and “TV.”

Ooops. Flunked it.

It’s designed to be a trivial test to detect serious impairments. No one would celebrate passing it — it’s like expecting to be applauded when an examining doctor finds a heartbeat.

She [Dr Ganguli, an actual physician] added that she did not recall a patient who celebrated passing the test, let alone publicly proclaimed it. “It’s treated with gravitas,” Ganguli said. “If anything, I see the opposite — people disappointed with how they performed.”

Have you ever witnessed someone you love struggle to pass the MoCA test? I have. It’s heartbreaking. Yet here’s this colossal asshole, who my loved one was smart enough to never vote for, acting as if he’s King Shit and claiming he was amazing at it. Even someone with incipient dementia can see right through him.

Don’t donate your body to Harvard

I’d long considered donating my body to science, once I’m done with it. Now I’m having second thoughts after learning about the Harvard morgue scandal.

I’m not at all concerned about the fact my body would be chopped up — I’d be dead, and the alternative is rotting or getting burned up — but what would bother me when signing the donation papers is that morbid ghouls like this bunch would be making tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars off my donation.

All told, prosecutors say tens of thousands of dollars changed hands in this gruesome years-long scheme: One indictment states that Pauley sent Taylor more than $40,000; Lampi paid Pauley more than $8,000; and Pauley paid Lampi more than $100,000. Sarah estimates that her ex made a couple hundred thousand dollars in total.

That money should go to the grieving dependents, not some random creep with a sick fetish!

Curious squiggles

On my walk to work this morning, I noticed these odd patterns in the snow and ice over the sidewalk. At first glance, I thought bird tracks or traces of squirrels rushing through the snow…but no, that makes no sense. They are variable in size and length and follow short meandering pathways, like this:

What’s your explanation? I don’t think it’s Cthulhu cultists leaving ritual markings around my house. My tentative explanation is that it’s an effect of salt — that we scatter salt on our sidewalk, which then generates the meandering scribbles as the sun rises and the warmth causes differential melt patterns in response to the local salt concentration.

Alternatively, I did initially try reading the markings. I couldn’t make sense of them, but maybe if I try harder the meaning will emerg…ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä! Iä!

I’m feeling it

Morris weather:

-23°C (-8°F), -36°C (-32°F) with windchill

It’s been this way all weekend. I lost all feeling in my fingers in the few minutes walking from the garage to my front door when I took off my gloves and was fumbling with my keys. Those dang metal keys are dangerous in this weather.

It’s hard to explain this to the people who actively avoid thinking, but the problem is global warming.

Stupid wiggily jet stream, letting all that cold air freeze me.

Void, abyss, both have their virtues

I know it’s MLK day, and that this is a day off for my university, and it’s also the day of the meaningless Republican caucuses in Iowa (bugger Iowa, I don’t care what that state does,) but it’s also the day before classes resume. That means I must now stop slacking. I have to focus, get my act together, and go in to work and get prepared for another long semester. How do I feel about that?

Can I do both, screaming and staring?

This semester is also going to be a huge change. I’m not teaching any labs at all, which feels a bit strange, and I also have only one hour of classroom time every day, at precisely 1:00. That’s it! You might be thinking that sounds pretty slack, too, except that two of my classes are writing classes, which entail a massive amount of grading, and the third, my eco-devo class, is going to involve a heck of a lot of reading. I promise, I won’t be sleeping in until noon and closing up shop and going home mid-afternoon. I’ve got the first 3 weeks queued up and ready to fire into the brains of the students, while I try to get ready for the next few weeks.

I’m thinking I should get both models. I can spend the first half of the term staring into the void, but I’m sure I’ll be screaming in the last half.

I wasn’t warned today

Apparently, all the students, faculty, and staff were warned to stay away from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus this morning. I didn’t hear about it until all the danger had passed. Some fool named Joseph Rongstad threatened to go on a rampage and start killing students.

The notice did not offer any specifics about the threat or how it was communicated, but Olson told the Star Tribune that the suspect went on an hours long threat-filled rant on his landscape company’s Facebook page. Some of the postings included a specific family as an intended target.

“Here we go AMERICA,” the last of his many postings read. “I am heading out … to the U of M Minneapolis mn to start killing kids. … if I can’t get the USA military to [come] talk to me face to face then I’m going for it to try defend your freedom America. … I may have been played … on this brain reading technology but today I find out for sure.”

The posting then warned, “IM COMING FOR YA KIDS AND ITS GOING TO GET BLOODY.”

A previous posting from the man also made a threat against Iranian students, saying, “If this government don’t have the total lock down of ALL university’s of Minnesota by this morning sun up watch out PARENTS … Kids will die for real amongst them u of m students.”

Other postings from the man made explicit threats to Sheriff Olson, and Chippewa County judges Thomas Van Hon and Keith Helgeson. In 2016, Van Hon ordered the man civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.

What I find a bit irritating about this is that the was in Watson, MN which is about an hour away from Morris, while the Twin Cities campus is almost 3 hours away, and we didn’t get an email notification until after Rongstad was confined and we were all out of danger. He did specifically mention the Minneapolis branch, but also threatened “ALL university’s of Minnesota” and we were the closest potential target. We got notified well after the SWAT teams had shut down the town of Watson for this ranting kook.

I’m just saying it would be nice if we all got the warning, not just the big city campus.

An old antique

This is a watch I inherited from my late grandfather. I believe it was from the 1940s or thereabouts — he served in the Army Corps of Engineers in WWII, and then worked as a highway engineer in Washington state.

The watchglass is missing, and a couple of hands have broken off. The mechanism is still kind of functional, in that when I wind it up it ticks away.

I post this on the off chance that anyone might know anything about it. It has sentimental meaning (I wore it when I got married!), and I’d also be interested in knowing where to take it for repair.

Also, it’s pretty and shiny.

The snow has finally arrived

After our brown Xmas and New Year’s Day, we’re finally getting a good slosh of snow, with a prediction of 5 more inches today. Right on time, the administration has sent out an email telling us to “develop a plan” to deal with inclement weather when classes start next week. We get no resources to implement this plan, of course, we’re just on our own on that. Good thing I’ve been dealing with this stuff for 24 years!