TIA

That’s short for “transient ischemic attack” — I had one. It was only 10 minutes of discombobulated confusion that ended quickly and went away, but it landed me in the hospital overnight. I got CAT scans, an MRI, heart monitors, the works, all while I fumed in a hospital bed because I had things to do, since classes start tomorrow.

All is well now, no detectable damage done, this was just a warning. I got a new pill and some dietary restrictions to keep it from happening again.

And now I have to play catch-up. Everything I was going to get done yesterday has to be done now.

Crossing the Rubicon

Back into hell with you!

I did it. I threw away a coffeemaker, just before the start of classes.

We had this Black & Decker coffeemaker, which ought to have been a warning sign — don’t get your kitchen appliances from a company that makes the kind of power tools you keep in the garage. It was needlessly complicated, with timers and a built-in grinder, and it had modes. I don’t need modes — I just want to push a button and have it make coffee. That’s it.

This one had a tortuous internal path to deliver coffee to the carafe, and it kept clogging up. The last straw this morning was when three quarters of the coffee ended up on the counter top, and I still have enough pride that I refused to lap it up. Instead, I swooped in, grabbed the infernal device, and threw it into the trash.

Now I’m committed. We’re going to Alexandria today to buy a new, simpler, more reliable coffeemaker. I also have to get some new shirts for the school year, and restock the refrigerator. Now I can’t put it off any longer, because waking up without coffee tomorrow morning would be intolerable.

New schedule begins…now

Classes start next week, so so I need to start getting my schedule back on track, which means I’m going to be in the lab every day at 9am. Summer’s over. Sorry, everyone.

So I walk into my office…after taking care of the spiders, of course…and what do I find in my u email? Another indigestible lump of text from one of the offices on campus that I’m supposed to add to my syllabus. It’s out of control. It’s ridiculous.

Can I volunteer for a committee that collects and collates all this absurd, ever-accumulating pile of what are basically inter-office memos that we are expected to append to all of our teaching materials? Here’s what I’d do: every summer, compile them to a linkable master file on a university website, and provide one line, a link, that everyone can add to their syllabus. Done and dusted. Two other things I’d do:

  • Provide a link so the people who create these things could submit revisions, which would be reviewed the following summer.
  • Set a deadline: the file is locked and unchangeable after, say, 1 August. You want to add more? You can’t do it the week before classes, and you have to submit it the Commissar of Syllabus Bloat, not to the campus wide listserv, who will put it in a queue to be dealt with 9 or 10 months later.

I think it’s safe to volunteer for this committee, since it doesn’t exist, and no way would the bureaucrats consent to submit to a policy that would constrain their advertising. Also, administrators don’t read my blog, it’s far too scary for them.

Classes resume in two weeks! <brain screaming>

I think I’ve got it under control, probably, although the internal sensations of doom and helpless descent into a spiral of chaos will continue until December. I’m meeting my co-instructor for cell biology this morning to synchronize our watches and re-attune our wavelengths, and my syllabi are nearly done, except that the other day the administration sent out another wave of boilerplate we have to attach to them. I don’t get the point of most of it; these are pages and pages of cover-your-ass copy that every single class will give to every student every semester for the next four years, and I’m pretty sure they all read the syllabus to get the list of readings and the dates of the exams and then skip the rest. I don’t blame them. That’s what I’d do.

On top of that, my spiders are erupting in babies right now, with another egg sac due to hatch out in the next day or so. My plan is to pull out a sample that I can set aside for observation, and the rest will be set free in my garage to hopefully prepare for overwintering. I’m curious to see how Steatoda triangulosa will do in a home environment, anyway. Maybe some will populate the compost bin, too?

I’ve got about 150 spiders in the incubators right now, which somewhat stresses me out with the burden of feeding every other day. And now I have to also feed students’ brains on top of that? I may have to set some priorities here.

Conservative philosophy is both stupid and pretentious

In case you didn’t know, John Rawls’ concept of the “veil of ignorance” is the idea that society should be structured by people who have no idea of what role they will occupy in it — that a truly just society has to be defined by principles that are equitable and unbiased. So, for example, when Thomas Jefferson was working on the Declaration of Independence, he should be ignorant of where he’d end up in this new nation — there’s a chance he could end up as a wealthy landowner, and also a chance he could end up a black woman, slave to a wealthy landowner. We’d have a very different country if that had been the case for those founding fathers, who ended up creating a nation designed for their advantage, and black slaves…well, sucks to be you.

You’ve probably exercised something similar to this in the standard cake-cutting problem. If two people are splitting a cake, one person cuts, but the other person gets to choose which half they get — basically, the cutter is behind a veil of ignorance about which piece they get, so they’ll strive to divide the cake fairly.

Straightforward, right? Really hard to implement on a large scale, but I like the idea. Unfortunately, it can also be abused. Carl Bergstrom tweeted this example out.

Aaargh. I sympathize with Bergstrom preferring to go birding. It breaks my brain to try and see her warped point of view, and unfortunately, I felt compelled to try.

I just can’t get past “would you rather be conceived…”. Prior to my conception, I did not exist. I would not have even basic preferences, like whether “I” would like to live or die, until “I” had undergone significant biological development. Eggs and sperm do not have preferences. Neither do embryos. Fetuses probably (but not certainly) lack a conscious sense of self, which I suspect is going to emerge in the infant (you need awareness of others to do that). I don’t see how this is even a decent thought experiment.

This is a bit like imagining asking sperm to vote on state laws, or dipping into the gene pool to get their opinion on the equitable distribution of opportunity. Those aren’t conscious agents who can even conceive of a philosophy of personhood, and almost all of them are going to disappear, oblivious of everything, before the next generation which can think & reason & feel & make choices arises.

It’s a really weird premise, too. “You” are a being independent of your physical, biological self, and you’re floating around in the ether making decisions about where you will manifest? It’s like imagining that you had a prior existence wondering whether you’d poof into existence as either a person with a lawn mower or a blade of grass, and invoking Rawls to rationalize how individual blades of grass deserve full social and civic rights. It’s nonsense. It’s totally McArdled.

Screw it, Bergstrom is right. I’m going to go spidering.

An excuse to make everything worse

What was this guy thinking?

Firefighters in Utah County fight a blaze reportedly started by a man trying to burn a spider with a lighter (Picture: Provo Fire and Rescue)

A man suspected of starting a wildfire in Utah told authorities that he was using a lighter to try to burn a spider.

He’s caught starting a wildfire. He knows he’s in trouble. His brain is scurrying frantically in circles in his skull, trying to come up with an excuse. It was an accident, officer, I was just trying to torture a small helpless animal when the flames got out of control. It’s not just the petty evil of his excuse, but that he thought a fellow human being would be sympathetic.

There is such a thing as bad publicity

Having just spent 20+ hours in our little Honda Fit over the weekend, I can still say I’m content with it. It’s solid and reliable, economical, and has held up well over the past decade — I hope we can get another decade out of it. I’d like to switch to an electric or hybrid car someday, but no hurry, and I can say that I’m not in the market for a new car right now.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if I were, I would not be looking at Tesla. Too much ugly baggage.

Before it was reported Musk had an affair with Sergey Brin’s wife, which he’s denied; before his slipshod deal, then no-deal, to acquire Twitter Inc.; before the revelation he fathered twins with an executive at his brain-interface startup Neuralink; before SpaceX fired employees who called him “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment”; before his daughter changed her name and legal gender after his history of mocking pronouns; before an article said SpaceX paid an employee $250,000 to settle a claim he sexually harassed her, allegations he’s called untrue; Musk’s behavior was putting off prospective customers and perturbing some Tesla owners.

Not to mention that I am disinclined to contribute to the bottom line of a loathsome billionaire. Or that the whole outfit is rather fishy.

It’s kind of weird that a 7 year old company with relatively low revenue and no profits which ships only 1% of the cars of GM and Ford can be valued higher than GM and Ford – but that’s where we are today.

I guess Elon Musk has a lot of people fooled, but not me.