We decided to splurge on Chinese take-out tonight, and of course we got a fortune cookie. I opened mine up, and this is what it said:

Say what? I’ve seen cryptic fortunes before, but this one was particularly puzzling. And stupid. I scratched my head over it a bit, thinking, “but does money really change everything?” and “how do I change the money? You mean like getting a roll of quarters?” Then I wondered what this has to do with me, or any customer for vegetable fried rice.

Then I flipped it over.

[Read more…]

If you still think the World’s Richest Man™ is also the Smartest Man Alive™, we’re laughing at you, too.

How do I know? My class with 20 enrolled had an attendance of 4 in person and 3 over Zoom. Thirteen ghosts! I make it easy for them because in addition to the in-person and zoom option, I also record everything and put that online.

I do rather miss having students right there, interacting with the material. It limits what I can do.

Anyway, I can now say in good conscience that I won’t be lecturing on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, because I know from past experience that hardly anyone will show up. Wednesday will be a play day, I’ve got a few science-related games I’ll bring in. If no one at all shows up, I’ll go hang out with my spiders for a while. They love me, at least.

Also, the second worst day for attendance is the Friday of deer hunting season, which hits in early November.

Moderation matters. It’s human nature that some people don’t grow out of their immaturity and find satisfaction in destroying things, splattering obscenities everywhere, and relishing being purposeless disruptors — it is, apparently, what gives their life meaning, since they are failures at everything else — so policing comments is necessary. That’ll never change for as long as some people savor being terrible human beings.

Elon Musk’s Twitter is being stripped of moderators, rules, and any vestige of sanity in what I can only interpret as self-destruction. Musk is one of those useless vandals who finds virtue in wreckage, and by removing any effective moderation, we’re going to see a steady decay of useful content. Twitter is becoming as lawless and unregulated as Facebook, and now people are rushing to insert misinformation…now blessed with the sacred Blue Checkmark, which can be obtained by anyone for a mere $8/month.

Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue.

Hey, if I were a quack trying to sell patent medicines that haven’t been tested and don’t work, that’s what I’d do: pay a pittance for a shingle I could hang for my dangerous advertising, so I could pretend to be a legitimate authority, and that’s what they’re doing.

But the tools are now being used to create a false sense of validity in order to spread dangerous falsehoods, including about vaccines. And groups on other platforms, like Facebook, continue to circumvent moderation by making minor changes to their names and the terms they use to promote anti-vaccine agendas.

Verified accounts are frequently seen as reliable and trustworthy, and Twitter’s algorithm gives them a higher ranking in search results, replies and follow recommendations.

“There’s a sense of legitimacy that comes with it,” said Barry. “By verifying this anti-vaccine account, they’re kind of verifying all of the misinformation it shares … it makes people think, ‘Oh, well, this is a verified account. This must be true.’”

They’re lying to circumvent any restraints on their propaganda, and they openly admit it! Machines can’t detect spotlights in a those silly robot verification tests on the internet, they sure can’t see a cunning liar, like this guy who is determined to spread vaccine misinformation on Facebook. Twitter is just lying there with its immune system demolished, it’s becoming as riddled with this nonsense as Facebook.

Facebook group admins, like Tiago Henrique Fernandes, reconstitute banned groups by using slightly different names, like DSN Official instead of Died Suddenly News, while keeping the same focus on anti-science messages.

Fernandes coaches members not to write certain words that will be picked up by moderators, he explained on a recent show produced by Children’s Health Defense.

Facebook’s algorithms look for keywords – like vaccine, shot and mRNA – to flag potential problems.

“I basically train the members to … get away from that kind of language and get more into undercover, what I call ‘carnival talk’ – that way the algorithms can’t figure it out,” he said.

Group members often refer to the vaccines as food – “cookie”, “peaches”, “cheeseburger” – or use purposeful misspellings, especially for purported side-effects like seizures (“see jures”) or cancer (“can sir”).

One phrase that is picking up steam in the anti-vax world is “died suddenly”, which may be used in official media reports to talk about any sudden death, making it harder to moderate automatically.

This is one of the reasons I bailed out of Facebook — too much garbage being peddled to profit Mark Zuckerberg, and too many stupid or evil people thriving in the stew of dishonesty. Next on the social media chopping block: the disintegrating carcass of Twitter, which is now making life easy for frauds.

The vaccines to prevent severe disease and death from Covid-19 are extremely safe and effective, with millions of people around the world vaccinated.

Even so, anti-vaccine propaganda has increased dramatically during the pandemic. Anti-vaccine activists “were prepared for a pandemic to happen”, and they were prepared to exploit it, Barry said.

Verifying anti-vax accounts and elevating their messages on social networks further entrenches anti-vaccine ideology in our culture, Barry said. “Anything that further legitimizes them, the extent of their influence gets even worse, and people don’t even realize that the origin of it is anti-vax.”

I’m afraid it’s more than passive neglect that’s creating the ongoing deterioration, though. I’m convinced that Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to save it, he can’t possibly be that stupid (or can he?) I think it was an active act of vandalism. He loves the attention he gets on the site, but simultaneously hates that it opens him up to criticism, so he’s destroying it in a stupid act of self-immolation. How else to explain that he’s letting anti-vaxxers flourish, has allowed Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson to return, and has let James Lindsay out of his cage?

There’s no reason for any of it, except to accelerate the descent into crepitude. It’s surprising because he didn’t have to spend $44 billion to do that, entropy and competition would have disintegrated it eventually, like MySpace, but he seems to be rushing to do in weeks or months what would have normally taken years or decades.

Could he please buy Facebook next?

I forced myself to step away from my work yesterday, and refused to even think about classes for a day. It was marvelous! I spent the day only doing things that sparked joy…which for me is setting a very low bar, so I tidied up my home office — there are still a lot of cables around here, but at least they’re tucked away — and went for a walk and read a book (fiction!) and cooked a light dinner and went to bed around 10, and even my dreams spurned any consideration of lectures and labs.

This morning I continued the trend and went into the lab for a while and tended to the spiders (still sparking joy), and now I’m relaxing in front of my better organized computer, enjoying (???) the news. Twitter continues its decline, with Musk lifting the bans on Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump, becoming even more of a garbage dump. And I don’t care! I think I’ll continue my policy of blithe sanguinity for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I’ll have to slap myself back into dogged work and cynical disappointment in the state of the world, but that’s tomorrow. Today, I play a little more.

In case you were wondering where I’ve been, this has been a killer of a week. Grading, multiple committees and meetings, registration advising, lots of late nights at work, little sleep, and getting ready for finals in a few weeks…and yesterday was just peak awful. I was just focused on classes all day, trying to get everything in shape.

So today I have resolved not to do my job at all. No classwork. No cell biology prep. Nothin’. I’m going to go for a walk in the snow, and then kick back and relax all day by, for a change, forgetting that I’m employed at all. I’ll think of something fun to do…although, I’m also thinking of maybe cleaning up my home office desk. Cables are taking over everything.

I know what race I’d play: hoplings!

What do you think? Thief? Maybe ranger?

I agree with this sentiment.

In the last four years I've become an "angry optimist" living by the concept of "militant decency." A fellow Terry Pratchett fan puts it best: pic.twitter.com/HqWqwcHTfZ

— Donna Dickens (Not Parody) (@MildlyAmused) November 15, 2022

What are you waiting for? Get angry, just be careful to aim it at the right targets.

The omens suggest it’s going to be a rough season.

Flu season is here — and early red flags suggest it’s on track to be very, very bad. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Flu View report show extraordinarily high numbers of positive flu tests reported to the agency from labs around the US. As of November 5, nearly 14,000 positive flu tests had been reported, as shown in the orange line on the below chart. That’s more than 12 times the number reported at the same time in 2019 (shown in the black line).

Combined with COVID-19 and RSV, I’m anticipating a lot of hospitals are going to be clogged up, so don’t get sick for any reason. Just stay healthy. Vaccines will help.

You know what else would help? Masking. That seems to be a lost cause right now, unfortunately.