Walleye fishing is a big deal here in the upper midwest, and fishermen may be known to exaggerate the size of their catch somewhat, but this is going too far. In a fishing competition, one team did more than just talk up their catch, they committed abuse of an animal corpse to pad their numbers.

The competition in Cleveland was supposed to last two days but was cut down to just Friday because of bad weather. Fishermen in roughly 65 two-man teams started the day in a specific location on Lake Erie and had eight hours to catch the biggest set of five fish.

That was going to be Runyan and Cominsky, until Fischer pulled 10 weights totaling seven pounds out of their entry, the tournament director said. Plus, Fischer added, he found filets from other fish that had been stuffed down the walleyes’ throats to beef them up. Unlike weights, filets escape the notice of metal detectors.

“It was just simply walleye filets inside of a walleye,” he said.

Wow. That’s just blatant. Those two guys are going to be so intensely ostracized in the fishing community, and they’re never going to be trusted again, that they ought to just hang their heads in shame, throw their gear in the trash, and never set foot in a boat again. If you think cancel culture is harsh on the internet, getting caught lying to such an extreme is going to utterly ruin these guys’ hobby.

Wait, those guys’ coats are splattered with commercial logos? Did they have pro sponsorships? Kiss those goodbye, too.

For the last few months, my home office has been plagued with these annoying fluttering moths. I swat them as fast as I see them, but their numbers have been increasing, and last night was the worst — they were trying to fly up my nose, my ears, my wherevers, and there was just a cloud of them in the house. It was these guys:

Rice moths. Ick. Evil incarnate. We finally realized where they were coming from — the kitchen pantry is right next to my office. I had proudly stashed away maybe 50 pounds of dry goods, in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and they had found my repository. Everything was double bagged, wrapped in plastic and stashed in storage containers, so I thought we were safe.

No, we were not safe.

We went through the containers and found that almost everything contained eggs and web clusters (except the lentils — apparently they don’t care much for lentils). Everything had to be thrown out. We dismantled all the pantry shelves and washed them down with bleach and hosed everything down. I wanted to cleanse it with fire, but Mary thought soap, water, and bleach would do the job. We’ve got some glass canisters that will go in the pantry once we’ve reassembled everything.

This was not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, but at least I can say the moth swarm in my office is currently greatly diminished.

I need more spiders in my house, although maybe the rice moths were just too disgusting to consume.

Yesterday was Elon Musk’s “AI Day”, and I don’t know whether to say it was a letdown, or that it was exactly what I expected.

The Optimus robot was not ready for prime time. Its motors worked: the curtains were pulled back, it took a few steps, it waved mechanically, it turned around, done. It did not interact with anything or anyone. It did not have to deal with any novel situations. It did not exhibit any behaviors beyond what you might get out of a Disney animatronic.

pic.twitter.com/EzxImHtqBP

— Tesla (@Tesla) October 1, 2022

I’ve seen more impressive animated mannequins in the Christmas window displays at ZCMI in Salt Lake 25 years ago. Come on, guy, show me something that requires intelligence and flexibility on the robot’s part.

I guess I can call myself an artificial intelligence researcher now. When I was 13, a friend and I built a Frankenstein’s monster in my bed, which could sit up (with the aid of strings we pulled) and roar horribly (tape recorder in its chest) and best of all, spurt red blood when I pushed a button on a pump. We invited my siblings to witness our creation in a brief little skit and then chased them out of the room as the monster rose up.

Oh, what I could have accomplished with a bunch of actuator motors, some shiny strings of blinking lights, and a Raspberry Pi.

Musk also showed some videos of Optimus picking up boxes and of using a watering can to water some office plants. Very short videos. Again, nothing that demonstrated any artificial intelligence capabilities at all. He brought out a second robot that waved at the audience, and it wouldn’t be a Musk demo without some embarrassing gaffe.

How many engineers does it take to push a high school robotics project? pic.twitter.com/MUw6v46Lb6

— Krombopulos Michael (@kr0mb0pul0smike) October 1, 2022

Yet he was promising that a home robot would be available in a few years, that they were going to mass produce millions of them, and that they’d cost around $20K each.

Musk himself is a terrible showman. He mumbled and “ummm”ed his way through a poorly practiced, short speech that had no pizzaz — he relies on overpromising rather than actually expressing some genuine enthusiasm. He’s no Steve Jobs, who could get up and announce “one more thing” that was an overpriced watch and get people rushing to spend a thousand dollars on it. I’ve been coaching undergrads in making scientific presentations for the past few weeks, and they’ve been so much better than Musk — spontaneous, smooth, well-organized, and demonstrating some genuine passion for their projects. They actually rehearse what they’re going to say and are careful about being accurate. I’d suggest that maybe Elon Musk would do better to hire some UMM students fresh out of graduation, except that I hope to Dog that none of them ever end up in a job that requires them to go through the motions of empty hype and lie with more enthusiasm than their over-valued billionaire boss.

It’s very difficult to take these kinds of criticisms seriously, when they are so profoundly stupid.

Your posts about Jordan Peterson show you as a resentful, bitter man, who doesn’t have even a quarter of Peterson’s intellect or brainpower. I’m not surprised you are so envious of his success and popularity.

You also currently do not have the cognitive depth of thinking to appreciate how profound and ingenious the Bible is – but that can change if you try harder.

I’m not at all envious of Peterson! I would not want to have his mental and physical problems, nor would I want the kind of popularity that puts me in the same room as Ben Shapiro.

I’ve read the Bible — well, I skimmed through long sections of it, admittedly, because it is a badly written, inconsistent bore full of pretentious text — and it’s not particularly profound or ingenious. Much of it is wrong or bad fantasy writing, which undercuts the claim that it is deep and clever.

The one thing interesting about the email is that it openly unifies two bad beliefs, in the profundity of Jordan Peterson and the profundity of the Bible. I pity the author.

Profound:

There are 7.98 billion people on planet Earth. This is one of their stories.

(I was interviewed for a podcast. I fear I might have rambled on about spiders a bit much, which is currently a terrible danger in any conversation with me. Sorry.)

This doesn’t look like pleasant weather.

I think you need a sacrifice. I recommend staking out your governor somewhere in the middle of that storm track. Work fast, it sounds like it’s going to be ripping across the state quickly.

If that’s not enough, you’ve also got an ex-president there who is pretty much good for nothing other than propitiating the gods.

Well, this is an unexpected ploy. The flu epidemic of 1918 didn’t kill people, it was all those cases of bacterial pneumonia generated by wearing masks.

Masks killed upwards of 50 million people in 1918. #NeverForget pic.twitter.com/z6kElknkg3

— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) September 24, 2022

(Don’t go after Gregory, he’s being sarcastic.)

It makes one wonder. So all those medical professionals who have been wearing masks routinely for the past century must have been suffering tragic levels of mortality thanks to pneumonia, I guess? Have doctors and nurses been dropping dead at alarming rates and no one noticed until INITIALS+STRING OF NUMBERS came along?

You know what else? Now I suspect that Jason, Michael, and Ghostface didn’t actually kill anyone. It was all the masks! It makes sense now!

I just encountered Bret Weinstein’s self-promotional blurb, and I’m kind of in awe.

I couldn’t puff myself up that much. If I were to write a similar blurb, it would be:

PZ Myers earned a PhD in developmental neuroscience at the University of Oregon, and has spent the last two decades teaching at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. He has tried to popularize science and evolutionary biology with a blog, Pharyngula.

That is all. Personally, I would attach more importance to my family life, but no one outside my clan would care about that. Claiming to have advanced a scientific discipline while working at a primarily teaching university is gilding the lily. Developing a new Darwinian framework is unbelievable; I do try to keep up with the literature and haven’t seen any dramatic Weinstein model of evolution sweeping the field. The concept of evolutionary trade-offs is so old I have no idea who first proposed it — it might have been Darwin. Oh, yeah, he at least implied it, in the Origin:

“The whole organism is so tied together that when slight variations in one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is a very important subject, most imperfectly understood.”

I don’t know what his important discoveries were.

He loses me at seeking a game theoretically stable path forward for humanity. That’s an epic level of pretentiousness. That’s the kind of meaningless drivel a guy desperately straining to pad his résumé to claim that while he may have been working at an undergraduate teaching university, he was actually making a grand plan for human destiny in his head, and that that should count towards his credit.

He also has a big bold label for himself.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST + PROFESSOR IN EXILE

It is true, he is an evolutionary theorist. It’s just that, as can be seen in that book he and his wife wrote, they are crap theories, warmed-over evolutionary psychology and panadaptationism.

As for “professor in exile”…no. He is not a professor. “Professor” is a category of employment. He was not exiled at all — he was asked to resign after alienating most of the student body with his intransigent and obvious refusal to support an exercise in civil rights, and walked away with a substantial settlement. He’s now milking the gullible with his martyrdom schtick. None of that counts as “exile”. He needs to revise that label a bit.

BAD EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST + PROFESSIONAL VICTIM

That’s better.

I was reading about this guy, Vitalik Buterin, who is supposed to be some super-smart crypto guy. There’s an infestation of them in the dudebro community.

Buterin comes from a long tradition of Silicon Valley special smart boys, who have had it hammered into them that domain expertise — i.e., actually knowing stuff — pales into insignificance compared to pulling ideas out of your backside by virtue of your superior intelligence and upbringing and social position.

He was taught this by other Silicon Valley special smart boys. Peter Thiel literally paid Buterin not to go to college any more, based on this theory — that one special smart boy reasoning from first principles will surely beat the accumulated experience and wisdom of mere humanity.

There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs.

Ooh, that’s mean. But if you’re like me, you want to know you can know how out of touch with reality they might be. Maybe they actually are really smart guys, you know. But here’s an example of thinking out of the box. Get a good grip on your jaw before it rolls under the table.

Before founding Ethereum, Buterin put considerable effort in 2013 into trying to convince investors to fund him in constructing a quantum computer. (Note that no quantum computers able to solve practical problems are verified as existing as of early 2017.) His plan was to use this quantum computer to solve computationally infeasible problems that can’t be done practically on an ordinary computer, such as reversing cryptographic hash functions.

Since he didn’t know how to build a quantum computer, his plan was to simulate one on an ordinary computer – since this apparently wouldn’t count as just running a program to solve the impossible problem. This was an idea that had long been put forward by Jordan Ash, his associate in this endeavour, who had put considerable effort into this startlingly crank mathematical notion.

How do you reveal that you know nothing about ordinary computing and nothing about quantum computing at the same time? I wonder if Peter Thiel would reward him with a big grant for this idea.