I think I’m recovered from my horrendous Shingrix vaccination — still a bit wobbly and fatigued, but progress has been made. The terrible thing is that we had a sunny, 25°C weekend, great for spiders, and I mostly missed it, and now we’re about to have a couple of days of heavy rain.
I will say that if you’re at risk of shingles you should get this potentially temporarily debilitating vaccine because shingles is so much worse.
I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.
I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.
My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.
Then summer arrives. I have big plans.
Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.
Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.
Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.
Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFAJoin us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.
Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.
It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.
Behold our midwestern sky!
We’re going to be 100% socked in all day long, with rain.
I don’t think our 68% eclipse maximum is going to be visible this afternoon. I’ve got class at that time anyway.
There is this obsessed congresscreature from Missouri, Ann Wagner, who really really hates porn (she’s a Republican, as if you couldn’t guess.) She’s been crusading against sex workers for years, and her latest idea is that she wants to shut down OnlyFans, because, she claims, it enables sex trafficking. She’s full of it.
However, the one good thing she has done is that she motivated an OnlyFans performer, Cherie DeVille, to write a defense of OnlyFans’ techniques to prevent abuse of the site. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a site there, and they are extremely strict about preventing minors from getting access, and to prevent its use for prostitution. I was impressed at the level of scrutiny they apply to their performers to make sure there is no non-consensual imagery.
Anti-porn zealots act as if OnlyFans tries to post non-consensual sexual content. But sex workers’ experiences tell a different story. One of my friends had surgery on her labia, and when she returned from the doctor and resumed posting, OnlyFans flagged her content. OnlyFans uses AI to monitor people, and its AI identified her labia as a different woman’s vulva. The site prevented her from airing the content without uploading an ID for this supposed new individual. I struggle to imagine a non-consensual porn epidemic on OnlyFans when it’s this strict about identifying individual vulvas.
That seems redundant and excessive to me. You know they’ve got lots of human eyeballs staring at bits of human anatomy, wouldn’t having users flag surprises in their videos be sufficient, without using computers to stare, too? They’re burning bandwidth that someone has to pay for! Also, I worry about what we’re training AI to become.
We get email. We all get email. Since the dawn of time, a lot of us here at Freethoughtblogs (and also many other people) have been getting demanding messages from Kooi Chong. Here, he introduces himself.
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am Kooi Eng Chong, age 28 and I am from Malaysia. In the year 2020, I had finished my Master’s Degree in History at the National University of Malaysia (UKM). Currently, I am attempting to write a book about world history and a PhD proposal about the history of the Chinese Communist rule in Tibet. Thus, here is my draft PhD proposal about the Chinese Communist rule in Tibet as stated below. Also, I had put my University exam results and my CV below. Moreover, I would like to meet you via Zoom. However, as I am working from Mondays to Fridays, I only can have a meeting with you on Saturday (9:00pm) Malaysia time. Would that be alright for you?
Looking forward to hearing from you soon
Regards
Kooi Eng Chong
That’s nice, except he keeps threatening to enclose his PhD proposal, and never does. Even if he had, I’m not interested. I don’t know why he would think I would care, and I have no idea what he wants from me, but he keeps scheduling Zoom meetings. Every few weeks, he sends us a message asking why I didn’t show up or reply and asking to arrange a meeting again. Here’s a sampling of his tedious and frequent messages.
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has been two and a half months already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you? If you can’t make it then you can contact me via my phone number: xxxx xxxx xxx. Would that be alright for you?
Regards
Kooi Eng Chong
Email: kooi.chong@yahoo.com.my
On Sunday, 1 October 2023 at 09:53:18 am MYT, Kooi Chong
wrote: Dear Sir/Madam,
It has been nearly four months already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you? If you can’t make it then you can contact me via my phone number: xxxx xxxxx xxx. Would that be alright for you?
Regards
Kooi Eng Chong
Email: kooi.chong@yahoo.com.my
On Friday, 2 June 2023 at 10:12:54 pm GMT+8, Kooi Chong
wrote: Dear Sir/Madam,
It has been a month already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you?
Looking forward to hearing from you soon
Regards
Kooi Eng Chong
Email: kooi.chong@yahoo.com.my
On Sunday, 23 April 2023 at 09:58:46 am GMT+8, Kooi Chong
wrote: Dear Sir/Madam,
It has been a month already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you?
Looking forward to hearing from you soon
Regards
Kooi Eng Chong
There are more, many more. I haven’t replied to any of them, nor will I — he’s very bot-like, and I have no idea what he’s trying to do. On the remote possibility that he’s a real human being, hunched over his computer in his apartment, sending out plaintive requests for human contact, scanning the internet for some hint that anyone recognizes his existence, I post this that he might discover that yes, a person has heard his cry.
And that he might learn this is the wrong fucking way to to anything.
If it is just a stupid bot, the most likely possibility, I’m letting it know that next week I’ll add a filter that’ll disintegrate all of its email before I even see it.
Bye, Kooi.
Boeing 737 MAXs parked at Moses Lake
It’s time for another depressing story about Boeing, and by extension, a lot of other American institutions that are being wrecked by the capitalist mindset. The situation at Boeing has been going downhill for years.
But Swampy [the nickname for John Barnett, a whistleblower] was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
I’m seeing the same thing in the university system: we’ve got MBAs telling us that the universities should discard “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” and become vocational schools that churn out degrees. The scary twist is that now the same incompetents who got us in this mess are not blaming their own stupid goal-directed approach — the new scapegoat is “DEI,” which is actually beneficial and enables the kind of new perspective that might help us out.
But Boeing is screwed. It’s run by idiots who tout “leadership” but don’t know how to do the job of an aircraft manufacturer. How can you overvalue experience?
“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
The focus on stock price, as if it’s a meaningful metric of the value of a company (a metric further eroded by stock buybacks) has not been a win-win. It’s been a disaster. They are currently losing tens of millions of dollars on each 787 they build, and their reputation is so bad they’re unsellable.
There’s a terrifying visual representation of this: the satellite view of the Moses Lake Municipal Airport in an arid stretch of Washington east of Seattle, or the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, where hundreds of Boeing 737 MAXes sit in abandoned parking lots waiting for someone to fix them so they can finally be delivered. Meanwhile, pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate, criminal investigations are under way, and another in a long line of stock-conscious CEOs is stepping down. Boeing’s largest union, the Machinists, is trying to snag a board seat because, in the words of its local president, “we have to save this company from itself.”
The company is doomed, because the moneyed assholes have a deathgrip on “leadership.”
SPEEA [Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace ] has demanded, understandably, that the board choose an aerospace engineer as its next CEO. But there are few signs that will happen: None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.
You might be wondering what kinds of penalties Jim McNerney suffered as a consequence of his catastrophic performance. Why, none at all, of course.
In 2007, as CEO of Boeing, W. James McNerney Jr. made $12,904,478 in total compensation, which included a base salary of $1,800,077, a cash bonus of $4,266,500, options granted of $5,871,650, and Other $966,251.
In 2008, his total compensation increased to $14,765,410, which included a base salary of $1,915,288, a cash bonus of $6,089,625, and options granted of $5,914,440.
In 2009, his total compensation decreased to $13,705,435, which included a base salary of $1,930,000, a cash bonus of $4,500,300, stock options granted of $3,136,251, stock granted of $3,136,242, and other compensation totaling $1,002,642.
In 2013, McNerney made $23.2 million in total compensation, which included a $1.9 million salary, $3.7 million stock award, $3.7 million stock option grant, and an annual incentive bonus of $12.8 million.
In 2014, as Chairman and CEO of Boeing, McNerney made $29 million in total compensation. Of the total: $2,004,231 was received as a salary; $14,400,000 was received as an annual bonus and a three-year performance bonus; $6,272,517 was awarded as stock (none was received in stock options); and other compensation totaling $760,000.
Meanwhile, John Barnett, the whistleblower and competent engineer, is dead. Something is wrong here.
This may be a terrible mistake. We’ve got a couple of groups of prospective students coming to the university this morning, and they’re going to get guided around the science facilities and their questions answered. We hope to encourage them to enroll here next year. And who was tapped to lead them around?
Only the homeliest, least charismatic, oldest professor in the department, the guy with the lab full of spiders, me. I’m going to have to have a talk with the marketing department.
It’s my own fault. A call went out for volunteers, I happened to have an open time slot at that time, unlike my colleagues who apparently also work harder than I do, so I raised my hand tentatively and got thrown into the machine. I will try to be enthusiastic and informative, but I can only push the raw material so far.
I’m planning to put some of the spiders from the colony under the microscope and project a live video view of them feeding. Do you think that will make our enrollments surge?
It’s still snowing. It was snowing all day yesterday. It’s not going to stop until 7am tomorrow, presumably.
Fortunately, I have been immersed in preparing another lecture on endocrine disruptors all weekend long, and haven’t even looked outside. Just as well, I’d probably just see flakes of BPA falling out of the sky at this point.
I am an addict, but a healthy one. One of my addictions is reading — every night when I go to bed, I have to spend an hour reading a book, just to settle my brain and redirect it away from constantly fussing over the work I’ll need to do. I try to vary the subjects: so one recent book was Silent Spring, which was a mistake, since it was way too close to my work, and another was The Demon of Unrest, but sometimes I just want some lazy trash, and Kindle Unlimited has been a great source of all kinds of interesting variety. Until lately.
When I look at the Kindle Unlimited offerings, this is what I see:
Do you detect a theme? I get screens full of boobs, crotch shots, and presumably seductive poses. It’s gotten ridiculous, and it’s gotten worse. The Amazon AI knows I enjoy a good SF novel, and to the Amazon AI, that means bosoms. Lots of big, pillowy bosoms everywhere…and most of this cover art is probably generated by an AI somewhere. There was nothing that interested me anywhere.
I had a wild thought that maybe the covers aren’t indicative of the content — maybe it’s the easy availability of cheap AI-generated art has led to writers throwing provocative covers on their work, but that there’s actually some good writing underneath. I made the mistake of downloading a random couple of these things.
No, there isn’t any good writing there. It’s all cheesy, formulaic, stupid shit. I skimmed one that was purportedly about a guy who found a gadget that allowed him to travel back in time to the early 19th century, which has potential for a good story and maybe some interesting stuff about history. Unfortunately, the extent of the history was the author (and his proxy, the protagonist) congratulating themselves on being smarter than those stuffy ivory-tower academics because he knew that the War of 1812 was fought in this period. Did he explore any details of that war? No. What got him enthused about time-traveling was the opportunity to get laid with a busty daughter of a minor politician. Thus, the cover.
What’s worse is that so many of these books are part of a series — sometimes 15,20 books long — that go on and on repetitively, never actually exploring the SF topic they nominally introduce. There are apparently people who consider themselves authors who churn out klunky dialog and interminable “stories” that are all wrapped around unimaginative sex acts, and seem to be written by and for genuinely stupid men. And they’ve driven out all the interesting stuff! (Be warned, though: download one of these trash books, and Amazon will try to feed you even more.) There are good books sprinkled in there, but they’re drowning in all the hackery.
You know we’ve got a guy on this network, William Brinkman, who is trying to make a living writing and marketing through Amazon, and I can’t imagine how tough it is to get noticed while swimming through that morass. He doesn’t succumb to the temptation of lurid cover art or an endless series of books chummed out with minimal effort. He’s also got a book on Kindle Unlimited, A Fire in the Shadows. I may have to stick to familiar authors, rather than exploring new authors, because the hacks have taken over, and that’s
a real shame.
The lesson: You can tell a book by the cover. Also, you get what you pay for.
