So this is how the semester ends

I just finished my third zoom meeting of the day, and also buckled down and got all those lab reports graded, and then wrapped it all up by calculating my students’ tentative final grades. Tomorrow I’ll write up the optional final, which I expect only a few students will take, and then I’m done.

I gotta say, though, seeing that all the women in the country are being stripped of their reproductive rights did put it all in perspective, making my struggles relatively light work. It would have been nicer to see certain horrible people hauled off in chains, though — it’s hard to whistle while you work when the fascists are taking over, and even now I can’t feel much relief at the finish.

Everything everywhere all at once

This would be a good day to sit and seethe until I melt down into an angry little puddle, but unfortunately, today is also the last major hoorah of the semester. The lab reports are in, I just have to grade them, and I’ve also got three seminars I have to attend, and then I have to assemble all the grades into a final assessment for the students.

At least I’ve got lots of distractions, I guess.

(Oh, yeah, I also saw the movie with the same title as this post the other day, in a gap in my schedule as I was waiting for more assignments to flood in. It was very good, highly recommended, I want to go see it again.)

Kinda sorta almost done with classes

The end is in sight! Then…SPIDERS!

This week is in a curious kind of limbo. It’s the end of the semester, which means the students have lost focus, and I’ve helped them do that. Here’s my general grading strategy:

  • The final exam is cumulative and optional. Whatever score they get on the final replaces the lowest midterm exam score. The point of that is to give students an escape hatch if they unavoidably missed or screwed up on one of the exams.
  • Their final lab report is due today, but lab scores are independent of exam scores, and the grade they get on it won’t influence their final exam grade.
  • They had their last midterm last Friday. I’ve already graded it and gotten it back to them.
  • They are all smart upper-level students. They have all their exam and homework and lab scores, less this one lab report, and I’ve told them exactly how to estimate their final grade.

They’ve got all the information in hand right now to know whether they need to show up for class, and whether anything they learn will be at all helpful in improving their grade. I also announced that Wednesday will be just for administrative sorts of things — final chance to scavenge a few points by arguing with me, or just to discuss whatever they’re curious about in genetics.

So less than a quarter of the class showed up today, I expect it’ll be even less on Wednesday. I’m hoping it’s a calming, quiet part of the term that they can use to study hard for their other classes.

I’m not quite through myself, though. A pile of lab reports will be thrown over the virtual transom at midnight tonight, and I have to get them all graded by Wednesday morning. Then I have to write the final exam, which I expect only a quarter of the class (again) will take, and which will be due on Thursday the 12th, prompting a final, brief flurry of grading, and that’s it. Really, I’ll be officially done next week, but it’s mainly just coasting along for me. Then SUMMER BREAK.

I have plans for that, too. I’m going to be doing some regular spidering stuff, and I have also vowed to strip all the wallpaper from our dining room and master bedroom and repaint by 31 May. It helps to give myself deadlines for the mundane boring jobs.

Too much truth

I have to agree with this video. It lines up too well with my experience.

About the point that stupidity is a sociological phenomenon: look at the mess we’re in, and then look at Fox News. There’s the breeding ground, that and all the other awful social media, like Facebook.

Numbers go up, numbers go down, what does it all mean?

Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter, I’m hearing reports of more popular liberal people on the platform losing hundreds of thousands of followers as people read the handwriting on the wall and abandon Twitter. OK, I can sympathize with that, but most of the people I follow are still there — I think it’s a matter of recognizing that whether it’s Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk, it’s assholes all over the top, and you have to wait and see if they actually do anything to compromise your experience. That is, compromise it more than it already is.

I thought I’d check my follower count, to see if I’d been losing people in droves, but the problem there is that I haven’t paid any attention to it for years. I recall that I looked at it several years ago, and was surprised that it was something around 70,000. I looked this morning, and it was 158,000! Why, I don’t know. I can’t determine whether I’ve had a recent decline, though, with my sloppy sampling. I’ll just peg that number to April 2022, and if I remember, I’ll check back in a few weeks or a month. Maybe I’m losing already. Or maybe I’ll get a surge of Nazis hate-following me!

I do know one thing for sure: starting yesterday, my usual quiet Mastodon account got hundreds of new followers (I have 1,700 followers there). I guess some are checking out the alternatives to Twitter already.

Hot tip: if you’re interested in Mastodon, don’t sign up for mastodon.social, which is the biggest instance and is seeing a huge traffic surge. There are lots of instances, almost all connected to the federation, so pick one that seems to have a high up-time and has been around for a while, so that you have a stable entry point. I’m using octodon.social, but there’s a long list of alternative sites as well.

In case you’re wondering what the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is, on the surface, there isn’t much. The big difference is that Mastodon doesn’t have a centralized server, but a lot of smaller, distributed servers that are independently managed and just share data with one another. Musk was free to buy his own Mastodon server, set it up, and manage it, and it wouldn’t have cost him $44 billion…but it also wouldn’t have allowed him to dictate how every other server is managed.

Oh. I guess that is a big difference.

If you’re sane, you should be afraid

Warning: the video below may induce seizures if you triggered by strobing lights.

That’s a promo for a QAnon conference. It’s utterly insane. It has everything: junk DNA, vaccines, Hitler, Illuminati, Trump, transhumanism, the Jews, prophecy, etc., etc., etc. It’s also got evil in it, but I think that was entirely self-referential.

After watching that hateful bullshit, the one question in my mind is…do I need to buy a gun to protect myself?

Because he’s rich and he wants it

It looks like Elon Musk is about to buy Twitter. It’s not because he’s a productive business manager — he’s not. It’s not because he’s a great human being who will make Twitter better — he’s an abusive petty tyrant. It’s not because he’s really good at social media — he’s an asshole on Twitter already. It’s not because he’s an all-around super-genius — no, he has repeatedly exposed himself as a dumbass who hires people smarter than he is to do the real work.

So what makes him the right person to take over Twitter?

Easy. He’s obscenely rich, and the shareholders want a piece of his money. That’s it. He gets to do what he wants on a whim because capitalism has unjustly given him far more money than he deserves. And the system is set up so there are shareholders who put short term profits above all else — if Musk runs the company into the ground, they don’t care, they’ll have pocketed their money and can move on to mismanage a different company.

Incompetence and greed rise to the top under this system.

Now I get to worry. If you want social media reach, Twitter and Facebook are the two must-haves, and I already killed my Facebook account. Where do I go if/when Musk poisons Twitter (this is a question I’m seeing a lot of people asking today)? I’m already on Mastodon, which has a small fraction of the reach of Twitter, and everyone is talking, tentatively, about Tik Tok, which is a completely different medium, and not one I particularly trust (not that any of the social media giants are trustworthy).

I guess I’m holding tight for now and hoping the rich asshole gets bored and decides to go make a flamethrower or a truck with bulletproof windows or something. Or until an alternative begins to take off.

Here’s a whole Twitter thread about how worthless Musk is.

Maybe he can move to Mars?