The latest train derailment is only an hour away from me.
A train carrying ethanol derailed and sparked a fire in Raymond, Minn., authorities said Thursday, urging nearby residents to evacuate.
It’s icy and melting in strange random ways — not uniformly at all, but the surface is getting spiky with odd shapes appearing. Like this example outside my door:
I admit, I’m impressed. Elon Musk has thrown away $24 billion in less than half a year. That takes real money savvy.
Elon Musk has revealed that he believes Twitter is currently worth $20 billion, or less than half the $44 billion he purchased it for just five months ago.
In a companywide email Friday obtained by the New York Times about employee stock grants, Musk admitted that the company’s value since going private, in his estimation, is roughly $20 billion; in the aftermath of Musk’s acquisition, many advertisers — the social network’s main source of income — fled the service, and as Vox reported earlier this week, haven’t returned.
That’s not the punch line, though. This is the punch line:
Elsewhere in the email, Musk said that at one point Twitter was four months away from running out of money, which sparked the need for mass layoffs and other cuts. However, an optimistic Chief Twit also told the employees that still remain there that “I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” and that he now views Twitter as an “inverse start-up.”
As ever, Elon Musk is the master of hype and self-delusion. No, he doesn’t have a plan to increase the value to $250 billion. Right now, he’s playing games with checkmarks that people can buy. I never saw the point of getting verified and getting blue checkmark on my twitter account back in the day, when the company was run by only semi-incompetent management, and now that Musk is imposing weird arbitrary rules to get people to pay for it, I have even less interest. He thinks this will help him increase the value of the company by $230 billion? That’s nuts.
It’s not the usual thing! This one is from my granddaughter, Iliana.
Excellent news. The treatments are working.
I woke up this morning, dreading the day — I have so much work I need to get done, and I have doubts that I can get it all done. But I must! I fired up iTunes while I was getting ready, and the first random song is Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi is Dead”, which calmed me right down. Second song: Patti Smith, “Horses,” which fired me up and I’m ready get things done.
Then I opened up the Washington Post, and there on the front page is an honest, positive article about trans people, “Most trans adults say transitioning made them more satisfied with their lives”. Yeah, obviously. About time a national paper was brave enough to say it.
Transgender Americans experience stigma and systemic inequality in many aspects of their lives, including education, work and health-care access, a wide-ranging Washington Post-KFF poll finds.
Many have been harassed or verbally abused. They’ve been kicked out of their homes, denied health care and accosted in bathrooms. A quarter have been physically attacked, and about 1 in 5 have been fired or lost out on a promotion because of their gender identity. They are more than twice as likely as the population at large to have experienced serious mental health struggles such as depression.
Yet most trans adults say transitioning has made them more satisfied with their lives.
“Living doesn’t hurt anymore,” said TC Caldwell, a 37-year-old Black nonbinary person from Montgomery, Ala. “It feels good to just breathe and be myself.”
That’s what we should want, that people feel good about being themselves, and that we should be aware of the discrimination some people suffer. Let’s fix that. It’s especially welcome to see that kind of recognition after the embarrassing, awful Richard Dawkins/Piers Morgan interview (I’ll have more to say about that later, after I get an exam assembled and after I figure out how to recover from a disastrous turn in my genetics lab.)
Good morning! It doesn’t take a lot to get a little uplift to start the day.
I’m in trouble now. I was late reading some official email, and learned (was reminded) yesterday that I have to submit my annual report describing what I’ve been doing for the past year. The report is due on 20 March…oh. Yesterday.
You’d think I’d learn. This has been a bureaucratic ritual every year for 23 years, and I should learn to expect it. First comes my birthday, which is OK; then comes my wedding anniversary, which is very nice; then comes spring break, which is excellent; and then…darkness descends on my consciousness, and my brain averts away from the cursed next step of administrative paperwork.
OK. I’ve pulled up the form on my computer. Now I have to go through my old records and remind myself of what I did in 2022. Then I have to justify my existence, despite the howling void at my core telling me that I don’t deserve to live and nothing I have ever done matters.
I’ll get it done today somehow.
I get these nice postcards, including a poem, from Theo Nelson every quarter, and I thought I’d share this one because it’s an interesting contrast.
I wish my region looked something like that right now. Instead, it was -16°C yesterday, and my yard is fenced in with 1.5 meters of accumulated snow. There is no color but black, shades of gray, and blinding white. Spring ain’t springing yet.
Mary is off to spend a week with our granddaughter, and it’s been a struggle. She’s supposed to have just gotten her own priorities straight — you know, packing, loading the car, that sort of thing — but instead she’s been fussing over me, as if I’m going to be helpless.
The cat’s even worse. When she sees luggage appear by the back door, she knows something is up and has been freaking out and puking all over the place.
I’ll be fine. I got a week’s worth of lectures organized and queued up this morning, and am looking forward to making a jambalaya loaded up with shrimp (Mary doesn’t like shrimp, so usually have to leave them out), and then, of course, the wild parties at my house starting tonight.*
*There will be no wild parties, sorry to say. Teaching resumes Monday.
Some people have been pushing the idea that COVID-19 was artificially created in a Chinese lab. There’s no real evidence for that — the virus itself doesn’t contain any labels of its origin, that a research lab in China was studying the virus isn’t evidence of manipulation (a research lab researching is what research labs do), and the people promoting the ‘lab leak’ theory all seem to have a political agenda to blame someone. I sure haven’t been convinced. Now there’s a new revelation: they’ve found genetic evidence from samples collected at the Huanan wet market that infected wild animals were there.
Way back in 2019, researchers were swabbing locations in the market and filing away samples for later analysis. Guess what? It’s later. Swabs sampled from a stall that was selling raccoon dogs have been sequenced, and they’ve found … raccoon dog DNA, which is no surprise. But they also found lots of SARS-CoV-2 mingled with it, which tells us that these wild animals were already infected with COVID.
A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.
“This really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory who wasn’t involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”
I’ve never been that interested in the question of its origin. I already know that we live on a planet of viruses, with an unimaginably huge population of diverse viruses squirting their DNA and RNA into every available creature, genetic material that is constantly mutating at a rapid rate, and what we ought to be amazed at is that we have molecular mechanisms of resistance, an immune system, that can cope with it at all. It was inevitable that something would evolve to get past our defenses, and that we’d have to adapt or die. That’s what we’ve been doing for the entirety of the existence of life on Earth.
That life changes and that there are naturally inimical forces that exist is an uncomfortable truth for many people. They’d rather think that a threat is by intent, that it had to be designed, and that the solution is to march out and do battle with a hostile, and purposeful, enemy (in this case, all of China. Good luck with that, I’d rather deal with it by improving public hygiene and developing new medicines.)
Now, can we stop wasting time looking for someone to blame, and refocus on dealing rationally with the pandemic? Unfortunately, there are many people who think the way to deal with a threat is to ignore it and pretend it has gone away. It hasn’t. The viruses keep on changing, thriving on the neglect that gives them an opportunity to proliferate in all these hosts who have given up, and it’s only going to get worse.
