My terrible awful horrible no good day

I give up. I’m going home early.

To start the day, we had more soggy wet snow come down overnight. Come on, Nature, I want my spiders to emerge!

I went to teach my class. This involves setting up a little camera to record the lecture for the students who are taking it asynchronously, and then connecting my computer to the video projector, two routine tasks that take only a few minutes.

I couldn’t get the camera to work. It crashed, and crashed hard, and wouldn’t restart. Yikes. I’ve got the in-person students waiting! So I charged ahead sans camera, figuring this means I just have to record a voice-over at home. More work, but I can do it.

Then the evil idiot classroom projection system gets flaky on me. I log in to the class software, which involves firing up the projector and entering a code into the software on my laptop, which then displays my video. Worked fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. I do so, works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code. Works fine for about a minute, and then the screen goes blank and I have to reenter the code.

You get the idea. I was getting nowhere. I finally told the students this wasn’t going to work, go home and we’ll try again Monday. There was much weeping and wailing and tearful moans about really, really wanting to learn about maternal effect inheritance and imprinting today, but I was strong…no, I’m lying. It was all laughter and smiles. I should do this every day.

Except we’re just starting to get into the really fun stuff in genetics! I need to get past this so I can talk about developmental genetics! And signaling! And cancer genetics! Maybe a little bioethics, too!

Oh well. I’m gonna go home and dismantle a camera. Or maybe swap in the backup camera I’ve got. And finish grading. It’s not like canceling class means I get any free time.

How about if we just call it “The Homophobic Space Telescope”?

I learned three disappointing things about NASA today. There’s been an ongoing kerfuffle over the name of the James Webb Space Telescope, because Webb presided over a remarkably homophobic culture at the agency. Now internal documents about the debate over naming it have been revealed.

Internal NASA documents obtained by Nature reveal fresh details about the agency’s investigation last year into whether to rename its flagship James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A group of astronomers had led a community petition to change the name, alleging that the telescope’s namesake, former NASA chief James Webb, had been complicit in the persecution and firing of gay and lesbian federal employees during his career in the US government in the 1950s and 1960s.

I already knew all that. Those aren’t the new disappointments.

One was that this problem goes all the way back to 1969, when a judge ruled on a firing case.

Although the documents reveal that key decisions were made in meetings and not over e-mail, they still show agency officials wrestling with how to investigate the allegations and control public messaging over the controversy. As early as April 2021, an external researcher flagged wording from the 1969 court ruling to NASA officials. It came in the case of Clifford Norton, who had appealed against being fired from NASA for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct”. In the decision, the chief judge wrote that the person who had fired Norton had said that he was a good employee and asked whether there was a way to keep him on. Whomever he consulted in the personnel office told him that it was a “custom within the agency” to fire people for “homosexual conduct”.

“I think you will find this paragraph to be troubling,” wrote the external researcher to Eric Smith, the JWST’s programme scientist at NASA in Washington DC. “‘A custom within the agency’ sounds pretty bad.”

Troubling? You think? The NASA personnel office considered it customary to fire anyone exposed as gay?

That’s old news, you say. What isn’t old is how the modern agency carried out their investigation.

The second disappointment is that they contacted 10 straight astronomers who said discrimination against gay people wasn’t a problem, and that was part of their ultimate decision to bury the controversy. Does anyone else see a problem with their methodology?

And then the third surprise.

The revelations about NASA’s decision regarding the JWST come at a time of increasing concern over the way the agency handles issues of identity. Earlier this month, employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, were told that they would no longer be able to include pronouns, such as she/her or they/them, in their display names in agency computer systems. After the move was discussed on Reddit and the astronomy community reacted negatively on other social platforms, NASA put out a statement that employees could continue to include pronouns in their e-mail signature blocks.

How authoritarian of them. So this month the administrators were openly transphobic, while pretending that oh no, they were never ever homophobic? I don’t think I believe them, especially since they tried to hide their findings.

Genetics can reach way, way back

A few years ago — in 2016? Yikes, time passes quickly when you’re miserable — Jennifer Raff gave a talk at Skepticon on The Misuse of Genetics in Pseudoscience. It was good stuff, right in my battery of interests. She debunked popular nonsense, like ancient astronauts, abuses of archaeology, ‘scientific’ racism, garbage notions about IQ, etc. It was recorded, so you can watch it now!

Dr Raff is even more famous today, and I’m sure it would be difficult to book her for a small convention anywhere, if we had them anymore, because she has just published a book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, to a phenomenal reception. It’s deserved, too. The book touches lightly on the subjects in her talk — you can tell that the blatant foolishness of popular ideas about prehistory rankles — but mainly the book is about her work in the anthropology of the Americas, viewing the history of this part of the world through a genetic lens…but also from a humanist perspective. She respects indigenous culture, and it shows.

There’s a fair bit of technical information here, but it’s a pleasant read. I tore through it in two evenings of bedtime reading, and probably would have finished it in one if that obnoxious habit of sleeping when tired hadn’t interrupted me. Here I am teaching at a university with a mission to serve the American Indian community, and it ought to be required reading in these parts. In your parts, I don’t know, but I think you’d enjoy it and learn a lot.

My Valentine’s Day lecture was nothing about romance

I’m still plugging away at my genetics course, and will be until May — so get used to me plopping in these long academic tutorials 3 times a week. You can ignore them, my students can’t.

I’m trusting that the students now have solid foundation in basic Mendelian genetics, so now it’s time to start cutting the mooring ropes so we can drift off into more complex and difficult waters.

What happens when you put an incompetent engineer in charge of brain surgery?

I worked through my last two years of undergraduate college working as an assistant in an experimental animal surgery. Much of what we were doing was training medical students in basic surgical skills, and installing chronic implants for a neurophysiology department. What this involved was shaving animals, anesthetizing them, locking their heads into a stereotaxic device, and then handing them off to the experimenters. They’d cut open the scalp, drill holes into the skull, and then precisely and accurately lower electrodes into specific locations in the brain. Then either they or I would close up, which involved slathering dental acrylic over the apparatus and stitch the scalp closed. Finally, it was my job to take the animal away to a recovery room and take care of it post-op.

I’m just saying that this was over 40 years ago, but I do have some experience in this area. I assisted in these surgeries on hundreds of animals, cats, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, even goats a few times, and I can remember precisely three rabbits that died on the operating table (rabbits are what we called “friable”, fragile and easily killed by stress) and two cats who died of post-op distress and/or infections. Those were memorable to me because, as the post-op animal care guy, when there were problems I’d spend all night in the recovery room trying to nurse them back to health.

So this story about Musk’s Neuralink tells me that there is something seriously wrong. I’ll put it below the fold because it gets ugly. Seriously, my experience working with small animals was disturbing enough that I spent the rest of my career working on fish embryos and invertebrates, and I swore off doing research on mammals.

[Read more…]

OK, grandchildren, what have you done for me lately?

Rotten kids. They haven’t been rejuvenating me. That’s the message I get from one silly study.

Grandparents planning hefty amounts of childcare this half-term might want to think again after research claimed to disprove previous findings of a “rejuvenating effect” from looking after grandchildren.

Many studies have appeared to show mental and physical health advantages for those who care for their grandchildren. But none involved researchers talking to the same grandparents before and after their caregiving responsibilities began.

When the authors of Is There a Rejuvenating Effect of (Grand)Childcare? A Longitudinal Study, published this week in The Journals of Gerontology, did that, they found that caring for grandchildren failed to make grandparents feel any younger than their actual age.

Sorry, Iliana and Knut, you know I only visited you to leech youth-giving properties from you, like a vampire or Peter Thiel. Now I know it was all a sham, so I can stay home in the future.

The one interesting thing from the work is that it exposed selection bias in previous studies. Those studies compared how subjectively younger grandparents who took care of grandchildren felt, compared to those who didn’t. Aside from just the subjective evaluation of the effects, wouldn’t there be obvious bias in that you had to feel fairly healthy and vigorous to volunteer for child care in the first place? That’s hard work, yo. When they compared the same individuals before and after, the Fountain of Youth effect disappeared.

Surprise. I don’t even understand why this was considered a valid hypothesis in the first place, but then I’m not at all familiar with that literature.

You know, in all the times we’ve made the long trip to visit the grandkids, and all the times my wife has had extended stays to help with childcare, we’ve never once contemplated the peculiar notion that it might shave a few years of senescence off of us. Every trip back home we’re mainly dealing with tiredness, because the little ragamuffins can run us ragged.

We go because it makes us happy. Isn’t that enough?