I wonder how history will look back on the first decades of the 21st century. When I was growing up, this was supposed to be the century of miracles and wonders, of science and technology leading us to a golden age. It hasn’t panned out that way.

America throwing away its freedoms in a frightened response to terrorism. Spastically bombing and blowing up distant countries in a futile 20 year war that ended in defeat. Electing the dumbest bumbling president in our history, then doubling down by later electing a corrupt clown. QAnon. Billionaires getting richer, unchecked, while demonstrating their idiocy. Our public intellectuals are Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. The IDW. A congress that sits on its thumbs while trying to decide if an insurrection to take over the capitol should be punished or not. Previously mentioned corrupt clown planning another presidential run while announcing his intent to jail anyone who disagreed with him…and not being arrested. Black people being murdered at will by cops. Climate change, and its neglect. The MAGA movement. Brexit. Boris Johnson. A serious pandemic that is approaching a million deaths in the US alone (although, to be fair, the US has been the absolute worst at making a coherent response to the threat.) Anti-vaxxers. And, to put the slimy icing on the shit-flavored cake, blockchain and bitcoin madness.

Here’s another story about how cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme. It was obvious from the beginning that it was a scam. It divided the population into three groups: the wealthy grifters who have been promoting it, the gullible marks who happily handed over their money to the lying con artists, and the rest of us, who were smart enough to see that it was another fraud by the rich to bleed the less well-off. Perhaps just as damning is the fact that our government closes its eyes to this massive Ponzi scheme running unchecked — perhaps because our government is run by and for the kind of people who benefit from it — when there are solutions.

Going after fly-by-night stablecoin issuers will devolve into a hopeless game of whack-a-mole. The only real solution is to ban the trade of private cryptocurrencies entirely. We cannot stop foreign actors from issuing unbacked stablecoins and manipulating crypto prices on unregulated exchanges. But we can make it illegal to sell cryptocurrencies on banked exchanges, such as Coinbase, operating entirely legally while they cash people out of the Ponzi scheme.

This would, of course, kill off cryptocurrency almost entirely, relegating it back to an oddity of the tech enthusiast. No one should shed a tear. Cryptocurrencies have virtually no legal use case. They’re great for facilitating ransomware, laundering money, distributing narcotics and child porn, running Ponzi schemes, and… not much else. They fail as currencies due to high transaction costs. They fail as “digital gold” or a “store of value” because they consume ludicrous amounts of energy to run what is essentially a glorified spreadsheet.

China already banned cryptocurrencies entirely, and India and Pakistan are poised to do the same. Other countries have also made moves to prohibit or constrain cryptocurrencies, but Western liberal democracies are notably permissive. This is in no small part due to aggressive industry lobbying, which includes hiring former financial regulators and compliance officers into the industry to influence policymakers.

We do nothing. Congress has been bought.

So yeah, I’m curious. How will the world summarize this moment we’re living in from the perspective of the 22nd century? So many problems, all with solutions that we talk about but never act upon, future citizens will wonder whether it was a consequence of contaminated tap water or some brain-eating fungus, because it’s otherwise inexplicable. Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because even if I had a time machine, the histories will probably be written in Mandarin, and all the ones in English will all be censored.

Sarah Palin is suing the New York Times for libel, so she was in New York City for a court visit…which was postponed because she was diagnosed with COVID-19. Now you and I, if we found ourselves infectious with an unpleasant disease, would probably isolate ourselves at home to avoid passing it on to strangers or loved ones; I even have contingency plans for alternative methods of teaching if I should come down with it. But not Palin! She took that opportunity to go out to nice restaurants with people, all maskless, of course. It’s not as if anyone would expect her to be at all responsible.

It gets even worse than that, though. Her thuggish companions would rough up people who questioned the wisdom of her behavior.

A half dozen NYPD officers were called to Elio’s restaurant on Second Avenue Wednesday night after a man dining with the former Alaska Governor on the Upper East Side roughed up a news photographer filming them dining outdoors.

“Are any of you guys concerned she tested positive for covid?” he asked. The moment the words came out of the Upper East Site photographer’s mouth, the man put his napkin down, stands up and takes a beeline for him— menacingly asking “are you looking for trouble” over and over.

The unidentified, large man dining with Palin grabbed the victim’s fingers with both hands, wrenching and twisting them down, slamming the camera to the concrete, the photographer told Upper East Site

There’s video of the event. It’s a clear case of assault. The assailant (now identified as Ron Duguay) has not been arrested. Why not? Is this perfectly normal, that a celebrity dingbat can wander around New York, spewing viruses unchecked, and having anyone who questions the propriety of her behavior beaten up? Is this what “going rogue” means?

A while back, there was an idea that swept through social media that there is this thing called biphasic sleep. People naturally tend to wake up in the middle of the night, that historically there was a thing called “first sleep”, and then people would wake up around 2am and putter about and use their bedpans or pick up a quill pen and write a sonnet or whatever, and then go back to bed for “second sleep” before rising at cock-crow. I found this reassuring, because as I got older I was shifting from continuous night-time sleep to an interrupted sleep that fit that pattern. It’s OK! It’s not just age and stress, this is how humans are supposed to sleep, I could tell myself.

Hold it right there, not so fast: it’s probably not true. There isn’t one way you’re supposed to sleep.

But humans have never had a universal method of slumber. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.

Even within preindustrial Europe, sleep contained multitudes. Reviewing the diaries of European writers such as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Ekirch found several allusions to unified sleep. Summarizing this complicated literature, he told me that “patterns of sleep in non-Western cultures appear to have been much more diverse” than those in Europe, but that they were truly diverse everywhere.

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that biphasic sleep is like anarchical foraging: Both might have well served some ancient populations some of the time, but neither of them offers a clear solution to modern problems.

I find that even more reassuring. Don’t hold people to the one true way they’re supposed to do something, everyone is different, different cultures lead to different behaviors, and there’s nothing wrong with being a bi or a mono-sleeper. Individuals can even change! The only norm is that we have diverse patterns of activity.

Although “like a baby” is a pretty good ideal.

I’m going to be pumping out these genetics videos three times a week (!), but they’re really not intended to be popular fodder that will generate hordes of clicks and views. I’ve intentionally put title screens on them that are horribly bland, because they’re really intended for my students. I’m also so tired from keeping up with my classes every day — in part because I decided to restructure and rewrite the entire semester — that I’ve had trouble planning anything outside of class. So, just to keep my channel alive, I’m going to try something structureless and informal — I’ll just ramble for an hour or so on Friday night and see if anything interesting dribbles out of my mouth. Tomorrow, then, I’ll turn a webcam on my homely face and talk for a while, without much preparation.

As you can see, I want to kick Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson a bit more, but also there’s this new paper on the evolution of the inner ear in bats, so I intend to say a few things about it off the cuff. Or about whatever else springs into my tired brain.

This little Darwin figurine I keep on my desk always looks like I’ve disappointed him.

Sorry, guy.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation wants your input.

I voted for a few. My criterion was that they at least have some connection to Minnesota.

It’s -25°C and snowing, but no worries, it’s going to stop snowing. Of course, once it stops, it’s going to get cold…-30°C by Tuesday. This cartoon is kind of wrong, though.

Lio

Silly Lio. You won’t be so thoroughly skeletonized until you thaw out in the spring, although your corpse can get severely dessicated.

On my to-do list for today is:

1. Organize all the supplies for the fly lab.
2. Record a video summary of the fly culturing procedure.
3. Figure out why my audio recorder did such a crap job on Wednesday, & fix it.
4. Re-record the audio for Wednesday’s lecture.
5. My lecture room has been moved to a smaller space, with a different arrangement of screens and whiteboards. Figure out how everything works in there.
6. Go home, edit the fly culture video.
7. Start polishing up Monday’s lecture.

So far, I’ve managed to complete #1. That’s it. I’ve been scurrying up and down stairs, hauling microscopes around, sorting out media, laying out materials on bench tops, and basically doing a lot of physical labor. Hey, aren’t I an elderly professor? What’s with all the sweating?

Right now I think the best I can do is go home, take a stab on #4 from my office chair, and start #7. Then I’ll come in bright and early and maybe not so winded to start with #2. There goes the weekend.

We’ve lost an epic heldentenor — Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, has died. He was such a fierce, athletic, passionate performer, and has in the past collapsed on stage a few times, due to dehydration…but really it was because he threw himself into his work so thoroughly and exhausted himself. I’ll consider his actual cause of death to be that he was always going full throttle and couldn’t just slow down and take it easy, ever.

By the way, his obituary unfortunately seems to think his weight was a salient point to make repeatedly. Nah. He was a big man, but that was the least important part of his identity.