Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
…at the Pharyngula store, something desperately urgent has come up: Sarah Morehead is in trouble. Those of you who know Sarah for her gentle activism in the atheist movement should also know that she’s an exceptionally nice person with a family, so these problems are not to be tolerated. I’ll keep it simple: it’s an ugly spousal abuse situation, which has left her and her kids with no support…and really, when you read her story, you’ll see she had no choice but to get out.
She needs help. She needs donations. If you can, get over there and chip in.
Are you scrambling for last minute Xmas gifts? I have a solution for you. Go to the Pharyngula online store, coming to a sidebar near you soon, and buy books and stuff from Skeptical Robot and Amazon. It doesn’t cost you anything more, but I get an itty-bitty cut, which is nice. Think of it as taking a small slice of the Evil Amazonian Empire’s profits and giving them to me, an Evil Blogger.
I just set this thing up, so there isn’t a lot there yet (I haven’t even started on the fiction section yet), but I’ll keep stuffing new entries in, as the whim strikes. Recommendations are welcome, but I’m only including books I’ve actually read myself.
ME, that’s who. I still have to upload these last few grades to the official site, but my computer is acting up, as always, so I’m going to have to walk in to my office and do it there. But to celebrate, anyway, I took off to fly my gadget. This is a quick buzz around the Morris Wetlands management district offices. Just because it’s empty and open land, and it’s very quiet (the whole town is quiet right now — students have gone home for the break).
This thing is fun, and the mechanics of flying it are easy, but just a word of warning to anyone who gets one: it takes practice. Lots of practice. Right now I can do all the basics of getting it to go up and forward and backwards and left and right, but I tell you, when it’s a kilometer off in the distance and you’ve lost track of its orientation and your depth perception is off so you think everything is fine but the camera is telling you you’re flying straight towards a tree, it’s a little nerve wracking.
Also, it’s really cold out there, around -15 to -20° C, and you’re actually kind of relieved that the battery is only good for about a 20 minute flight, because you’re fingers are freezing off. Note also it’s not the best day for photography: hazy and gray, flying over a world that’s mostly white. But that’s Minnesota.
The usual suspects are currently howling and thrashing and having temper tantrums over Steve Shives, another white guy who thinks we ought to welcome diversity, but they’re also taking the opportunity to fling accusations of hypocrisy my way. It’s simply amazing how triumphantly they are spamming my email and twitter account with this irrefutable proof that I lied.
Gosh. They got me now…oh, wait. Read that last comment. It might help.
No, I have never been accused of sexual harassment. If you were to have access to my employment record, you’d find it was completely clean — I simply do not harass women (or men, for that matter), and never have. It’s also not that I have been exonerated of charges — I’ve never been charged with harassment, because I’ve never done it (note that this does not imply that being accused means you are guilty), and I’ve scrupulously avoided circumstances where there is even an opportunity for such an accusation.
They love to make much of that incident in the 1990s — in which a young woman thought she could get a better grade by extortion. I responded by immediately removing myself from the situation and making the situation open to investigation by authorities. She did not accuse me because she couldn’t.
So I have been threatened with extortion, but no extortion took place. Similarly, I get weekly murder threats, but I have not been murdered. I am conscious of the distinction, but these wackaloons apparently are not.
By the way, these loons have also sent wild accusations of harassment to my university employers…who have treated their baseless bullshit with the respect they deserve. Those also are not credible accusations.
This is the Transsiberian Railway.
It stretches across the whole of Russia, cutting through places with incredibly cold, barren reputations. It’s the middle of winter.
Our crazy brave daughter Skatje is off to that place today. She’s going to spend three weeks visiting St Petersburg and Moscow, and then boarding that train and crossing Siberia, in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why? She loves Russian culture and the Russian language, and she wants to learn more and see more, and this is her opportunity. So she just decided to go.
Now, while I’m quite proud as a father to have a child who has grown to be so fearless and confident, her parents are going to be a bit anxious for the next few weeks. So, to any Russian readers out there: if by some slender chance, you’ve both read this mention and also encounter an enthusiastic and adventurous American woman on a journey across your country, say hello and remember that she’s there as a friend. And we need more friends around the world.
I am getting there!
I am enervated and enfeebled, my eyes are bleeding, and I’m currently prone to fits of vomiting, but I got through all the current paperwork for my cell biology course. Tonight I’m on the 11:00-12:30 shift of our UMM tradition of serving pancakes to the students the night before finals week begins.
Tomorrow will be spent in my office composing a final exam and dealing with distraught students who have just learned what their grade is. I give the final exam on Wednesday, and only 45 students are likely to take it — it’s optional, and I’ve already informed the five students who have a locked-in A in the class that they shouldn’t bother to show up.
Yeah, 10% are getting As. I’m such an easy grader.
Oh, where it says “PARTY HARD“? I think that’s going to involve going to the midnight showing of the new Star Wars movie, because I’m such a nerd, and optimism is briefly winning out over cynicism…but I will walk into that theater with very low expectations.
I might as well sign up as crew on a Viking dragon ship.
Do you want to join the crew? The voyage from Norway to America will be a challenging and demanding but unique experience. It is important to be of good health and have a strong physique. Draken Harald Hårfagre is an open ship, there is no under deck and the only shelter is a small tent. It will be cold, wet and hard work. We will need crew from April to September 2016, and we want our crew to be a part of the project for at least 2 months at a time.
Fill out the form and we will get back to you. Please fill it out as thoroughly as possible. Do not forget to mention if you have any special skills that can be of value for the project. We will start the recruitment process in December and keep it open until February or until we filled the positions.
Oh. They have requirements. Damn.
But wait! Special skills! Does berserkergang count?
Here I am, deep in the grading mines, and my laptop has decided to expire on me, with intermittent periods of constant crashing interspersed with lulling sessions in which all is working smoothly. I never know when it’s going to behave itself or throw little electronic temper tantrums, the screen going black and then rebooting itself repeatedly.
Grades are all backed up on multiple media, of course, so nothing is lost, but updating those grades has become unreliable, and I’ve also lost several things I was writing to laptop hissy-fits. So I’m reduced to the iPad, which is simply not as good for long writing sessions. Updates here might get sporadic and weird.
The only real solution is that Mary is getting me this for Christmas: Apple MacBook Pro 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display and Force Touch – Intel Quad-Core i7 2.8GHz, 1TB Flash Storage, 16GB DDR3 Memory, AMD Radeon R9 M370X Graphics with 2GB Memory
I’m warning you, I might just lose my mind for a while. How do people function without a big slab of splendid silicon supplementing their existence?
My classes are all done! My last thing today was to give my cell bio class an exam on DNA replication, transcription, translation, and gene regulation, and whoa, were they ever a hangdog, shell-shocked bunch trailing out of the classroom afterwards.
Now it’s my turn to retreat with all of these papers and get everything graded over the weekend. We’ll see who is hangdog and shell-shocked by Sunday night!
