The University of Minnesota president sends me warm wishes!

Gosh. How nice.

When Biden pledged to “follow the science,” it was hard to imagine that the country could have ended up here. But the administration made a big bet that vaccines would provide sterilizing immunity and end the pandemic, allowing it to move on to other priorities. Leaving behind the insanity of ivermectin, hydroxy­chloroquine, and bleach was certainly a great step forward. However, evolution has had other plans, and variants of severe acute respiratory syndrome corona­virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) have kept the pandemic going. This left the White House in a very tight spot: There was little political will to keep pushing nonpharmaceutical interven­tions, yet the pandemic was far from over. Add to this mounting inflation worries and concerns about the war in Ukraine, and the response has been a clumsy pivot to a message that politicians always turn to: personal responsibility. Get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask, get a prescription for the antiviral Pax­lovid—if you want to. This may be fine if you have a healthy immune system, great health insurance, and the ability to navigate the US health care system. But what about everyone else?
COVID-19 is at a similar place to where the HIV/AIDS global pandemic was when the antiretroviral drugs came along. Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves told me about important parallels between both pandem­ics. “The HIV epidemic didn’t go away,” he said. “It just went to where people could ignore it. It went into the rural South, it went to communities that were already facing disparities in health.” At that time, confusion between medicine and public health was also an im­portant factor. “The discourse shifting to private choice and private adjudication of risk is really not what public health science is,” he said. “We work in populations. And if we’re talking about medicine, it’s about private risk and private choices.”

Oops, no. That isn’t Joan Gabel’s message! That’s from the editor of Science magazine, explaining that it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and he concludes,

SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly mutating and recombining, and more variants and subvariants—potentially more pathogenic—are on the horizon. The world is still barely vaccinated, and even in wealthy countries like the United States, resources are inequitably distrib­uted. It absolutely ain’t over. And this is no time to drop the ball.

The message from the university president is a little different. She is announcing that it is time to drop the ball.

The university administration will “respect and honor the decision of those who choose to wear a mask,” but they’ll respect the yahoos who refuse to wear a mask a little more.

“Respect” also means telling me I’m required to teach in-person to classes full of unmasked students in the fall.

Please, Joan, don’t ever wish me anything ever again, warmly or otherwise.

Christian masculinity

It’s a horrifying thing. Look at the effect it has on men, amplifying their sense of entitlement.

I find the insistence on “daddy” as a name for your partner to be deeply perverse. If my wife tried it it would probably set me aback, and no, I’m not going to call her “mommy”, or in a Pence-style move, “mother”. Ick.

For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever addressed my wife with a pet name. She’s a person, dang it, not a toy or a child or a stereotypical role, and she has a name, a real name, and her own identity. Same as me.

If two people in love have nicknames for each other, that’s fine, just not my thing — but if you insist on “sir” or “lord” or “master”, you’re not in love, you’ve got a possession.

(OK, another possibility: if it’s part of a role-playing scenario, that’s also fine. Yeesh, interpersonal relationships are complicated.)

I guess we have to do both

Siggy has a very good essay up about a subject I care about: Blogs vs. YouTube.

Blogging has been declining. I don’t have much evidence, aside from Google trends, but it’s fairly obvious from personal experience. For example, atheist blogs used to be a huge cultural force, with big celebrities and countless indie blogs, and now it’s sort of a backwater with a few networks of marginal relevance, and a mostly dead indie space. And no other blogosphere has replaced what atheist blogging once was.

Maybe his just has to do with my personal circles? As a reality check I tried looking up the question. I learned, according to Google, that blogging is bigger than ever, and is still a great way to make money by advertising your product! Okay, so I should specify that I’m not interested in all blogs, because marketing blogs can go die in a fire. I’m talking about personal blogs, and more specifically essay blogs. Essay blogs are declining, that’s what I meant.

Essays aren’t dead though, because it is now popular to present essays in video format. The video essay is a booming genre, and I for one think it’s great, for the same reason essay blogs are great. But there are also some significant differences.

They make a lot of good points, but I’d add that the barriers to entry for video essays are much higher. Sure, you can do some of it on the cheap, witness all the cell phone camera videos, but the big timers have production skills and are deploying good lighting and even sets. There are also new presentation skills you have to know — being able to speak quickly and smoothly is not a universal ability. I know I’m more comfortable taking an hour or two to write than just getting in front of a camera and talking for 10 minutes. I also don’t have to put on makeup to write something over coffee (not that I put on makeup for any of my videos).

I’ll also disagree with Siggy on one thing: drama is not more difficult on YouTube. In some ways it’s worse. Take some right-winger who is good at just spewing noise and doesn’t bother to actually research what they say (say, Sargon, or Steven Crowder, who make gobs of money on noise), and they can generate lots of drama, much of it consisting of guys yelling at each other. Tim Pool and Alex Jones are nothing but masturbatory auto-generated drama! I manage to avoid much of it by the simple expedient of favoring videos that are under a half hour long. While there are some people who are really good at long format, in-depth conversations, the most successful people on YouTube seem to be cheesy motormouths who can yammer for hours, usually about gossipy trash-talk, or squeaking as they play video games. If you aren’t putting in more time to research what you’re going to say than in saying it, you probably aren’t worth listening to.

Also, one thing the two approaches have in common is they’ve both been saddled with the most hideous names. Blog? Vlog? Bletch.

One of the reasons for the decline of blogs, I’d argue, is the efforts of the big services to concentrate control in their hands. When blogs were big, we were using RSS readers and news feeds, which were distributed mechanisms for customizing and personalizing access. Now everybody is at the mercy of The Algorithm, whatever that is, and goes to a centralized site like YouTube that uses their software to guess what you’d like to see, and often guesses wrong.

The Martian absurdity

I saw this comment on Mastodon, and thought it so appropriate that it needs to be spread further.

alien 1: in summary, the humans have nearly rendered the blue planet uninhabitable. The only plan they appear to have is to migrate to the red planet.

alien 2: can they breathe the atmosphere of the red planet?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: is there material there they can eat?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: can the plants and animals of their planet live there?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: is there liquid water there?

alien 1: no.

alien 2: lol wtf?

alien 1: lol idk

WTF, IDK is how I feel about it, too.

Y’all better call your moms today!

I am clearly not suited to a life of manual labor. You see, I started on a little summer project this morning. I don’t know how long I’ve got, but I’m definitely going to die long before my wife, and it’s not as if I’m leaving her a vast inheritance — this old house is about it. I decided I need to do some home improvements before it’s too late, and the immediate task that came to mind is repainting the dining room and bedroom. Both were afflicted with terrible wallpaper that was peeling, as well as being hideous, and I know that Mary will have to sell the place and move to someplace less remote once I kick the bucket, and while she’s worrying about papers and cremation and all that other nonsense, she’s not going to have time to prep the house for resale.

So I figure I’ll do a few things while I’m still ambulatory. I started with stripping the wallpaper with a steamer this morning.

There’s a lot of bending and stooping and working near the floor and also higher up, and I got through about half the job, and hour and a half into it, before my back decided to go into spasms. This was not pleasant. I can tell I will not last long at all in the work camp after the Republicans take over, but now at least, I can sit down and pop ibuprofen for a bit, until I recover, and can get the remaining half done.

As long as I’m sitting down, I called my mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. Have you called yours, if you have one, and if she’s the kind of mother who deserves your affection? I’ve got one, and she does. Unfortunately, she also has voice mail. Oh, well.

Jeez, this photo is 10 years old? I’m getting old.

So you’ve been reminded, and I better remind my kids, ’cause their mother deserves a call. They can also say hi and be grateful to me, because I was thinking that once I’m dead, if I don’t get the various jobs I’m planning done, they’re going to have to come home to Morris and do all the house maintenance themselves to help their mother out.

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.