All eugenicists are incompetent geneticists

It’s more of a pathetic squeak.

Dave Futrelle found something provocative: a new type of guy (and he has lots of opinions about breeding). It’s an out-and-proud eugenicist, one who doesn’t seem to know very much about genetics, but he has written an unfinished app called Seekia, a genetics aware mate discovery network with the goal to help humanity mate in a genetics aware manner. It makes many grand claims about being able to compare your genetic constitution to that of a potential mate, and calculate the likelihood of healthy offspring. It is not at all clear where it’s getting genetic information from, so the premise is dubious, but also the app announces that it is incomplete, and cannot actually connect to the internet, so its conclusions are entirely imaginary. Furthermore, you can’t directly download the silly thing: you have to download the source code, and compile it for yourself.

No, I’m not going to do that.

Anyway, Futrelle had many examples of claims made by the creator of Seekia on Bluesky that were entertainingly demented, but Bluesky’s censorship police seems to have deleted them. Damn you, Bluesky! No, wait, that’s actually one of the good features of Bluesky, that weird stupid racist garbage is less likely to survive. Maybe he should use Twitter.

Do not be dismayed by all the “Post not found, it may have been deleted” announcements all over the We Hunted the Mammoth article. The creator of Seekia, Simon Sarasova, has helpfully archived his posts on his own web page, so you can still be entertained by his stupid thoughts. What would you do without this insight?

Obesity is an enormous problem which harms billions of people.

Obesity causes people to be uglier, less mobile, less healthy, less capable of having sex, and less able to enact virtue in the world.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of obesity.

The world would be a better place without obesity.

The answer is eugenics. Or what about this problem?

Stupid people are worse at driving cars.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to make people more intelligent and better at driving cars.

The world would be a better place with fewer car accidents.

Cool. Instead of traffic tickets, the police will just send a medical team to your house to sterilize your children, I guess. They’ll also check those children to enforce gender norms.

Humanity should use eugenic techniques to reduce the prevalence of gender dysphoria disorder.

The world would be a better place without gender dysphoria disorder.

He’s also fond of quoting the Unabomber and Stefan Molyneux. But those are all short, social media style posts — to really see deeply into his shallow thoughts, you have to read his blog. Here’s an excerpt from one of his articles, Why Race Extinction Matters, so you can better understand why maybe responsible social networks are undermining his ability to spread his message.

Modern transportation technology has facilitated the spread of all human races to all regions of the world. This has accelerated the rate of interracial breeding, and has thus accelerated the rate of change in humanity’s appearance. I posit that global population growth and modern widespread human race mixing have both increased the total quantity of races. Novel combinations of races are being bred into existence.

Many modern human races are at risk of going extinct. Both the increased prevalence of interracial breeding and global fertility collapse are contributing to the risk of race extinction. Without intervention, all modern human races will eventually go extinct due to evolution, which gradually changes each race until their old traits disappear. For example, modern humans look very different from humans who lived 100,000 years ago.

Seekia is a race aware mate discovery network I created. Users can share their racial information in their profiles and filter prospective mates based on their race and the calculated race of their offspring.

One of Seekia’s goals is to help prevent race extinctions by helping members of modern endangered human races to meet and have children.

I don’t think he understands the terms “race,” “extinction,” or “genetics,” while simultaneously being obsessed with race, extinction, and genetics. Also with beauty, circumcision, acne, driving, baldness, female body hair, penis size, and obesity.

He fits right into the Manosphere. Although…does the manosphere still exist? You don’t hear much about it anymore.

The Pope has a surprise for us all

Pope Leo XIV is a trans man.

X, of course.

You don’t doubt this conclusion, do you? How can you question a guy who has dedicated his life to superimposing the outlines of skulls on celebrity photos and deciding what sex they are? Also, they’re a Christian.

Bones never Lie, but people do ~ wake up from their Lies ~
Genesis 1:27, 2 Timothy 3:13 ~ Glory to God and praise to Jesus.

Browse his Xitter feed and you will discover that practically no one is the the sex they say they are.

I wish I could make stuff up and call it science

I took a break and went looking for some light entertainment, which is reliably discovered in the fringes of arXiv. Here we go: Ground to Dust: Collisional Cascades and the Fate of Kardashev II Megaswarms.

Extraterrestrial intelligences are speculated to surround stars with structures to collect their energy or to signal distant observers. If they exist, these most likely are megaswarms, vast constellations of satellites (elements) in orbit around the hosts. Although long-lived megaswarms are extremely powerful technosignatures, they are liable to be subject to collisional cascades once guidance systems start failing. The collisional time is roughly an orbital period divided by the covering fraction of the swarm. Structuring the swarm orbits does not prolong the initial collisional time as long as there is enough randomness to ensure collisions, although it can reduce collision velocities. I further show that once the collisional cascade begins, it can develop extremely rapidly for hypervelocity collisions. Companion stars or planets in the stellar system induce perturbations through the Lidov-Kozai effect among others, which can result in orbits crossing within some millions of years. Radiative perturbations, including the Yarkovsky effect, also can destabilize swarms. Most megaswarms are thus likely to be short-lived on cosmic timescales without active upkeep. I discuss possible mitigation strategies and implications for megastructure searches.

Has anybody seen a Kardeshev II civilization? Spotted any megaswarms through your telescopes? It must be fun to write papers about speculated phenomena, as if they exist.

There’s a fair bit of math in that paper, and I can see where it might be applicable to, for instance, the fate of Saturn’s rings, but I think I’ll wait on developing mitigation strategies until we actually have a Kardashev type II civilization, if such a thing is even possible. It’s a bit like guessing how a god would deal with a few billion angels suddenly showing up at the gates, and getting it published as a science paper.

Zizians?

What the hell? I just learned about the Zizian death cult from Rebecca Watson. Why? What did I do to deserve this knowledge?

Short version: Zizians are trans vegan tech nerds who splintered away from the Less Wrong rationalist cult. Now they’re murdering people, and especially each other, to further some weird vision of a beautiful rational future where no one kills animals, putting Effective Altruism to work. I trace the problem not to veganism or trans or tech nerdiness, but to getting tangled up in the twisted arcane “philosophies” that are flourishing in Silicon Valley…and also generally to any obsessive extremism.

You’ll have to let Rebecca explain it all to you, because I don’t want to think about them anymore.

What happens when you farm out your scientific illustrations to an AI?

Things get psychedelic. These are actual illustrations from a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway. They had Midjourney do the illustrations, and they are spectacular! And confusing and uninformative.

Regulation of biological properties of spermatogonial stem cells by JAK/STAT signaling pathway. (A) The relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell proliferation; (B) Relationship between the JAK/STAT signaling pathway and the microenvironment of spermatogonial stem cells; (C) Relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell tissue differentiation; (D) Relationship between JAK/STAT pathway and homing migration of spermatogonial stem cells; (E) The JAK/STAT pathway and immune regulation in spermatogonial stem cells.

Look at the labels! AIs are terrible at reproducing text in images, and these make no sense…and most of the diagrams are random piles of throbbing circles. What do they mean? I don’t know.

But here’s my very favorite image. What have they done to that poor rat?

Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes.

The labels…they do nothing! The text of the paper makes sense and is a reasonable discussion of the role of the JAK/STAT pathway in spermatogonial differentiation, but then your eyes wander over to those bizarre illustrations and you get totally discombobulated.

I should print that last picture out in color, and place copies at floor level around my house as a rodent repellent. Except my cat already has a problem with frequent puking.

Johnson’s johnson

I’m sorry, but I was up at 5 putting the finishing touches on two exams I’m giving this afternoon, and which I have to get graded by tomorrow morning, because I’m giving a third exam tomorrow, which also has to be graded quickly. I’m in a bit of a haze right now, but I feel a need to comment on this:

Ultra-creepy millionaire Bryan Johnson has increased his creepiness score ten-fold by hooking up a machine to his penis every night to record its unconscious activity, and worst of all, is bragging about it on the internet. He’s spending $2 million per year to try and game aging, getting scores on arbitrary metrics that he can point to and brag that his body parts have different ages.

Now he wants to have the penis of an 18 year old.

He claims he now has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the fitness of an 18-year-old.

I know it’s an old joke, but where does he keep them? In jars on his mantelpiece?

I apologize again. My only excuse is that I’m addled with exhaustion and will be getting no respite until next week.

Hey, I’d look younger than my age if I could spend a few million dollars to hire people to write and grade these exams.

Now the spiders are leaving

Oh no. I was laughing at this very silly woman who claims the emergency phone alert system test the other day made everyone’s menstrual flow start. She has an n of 1, herself, and she admits that she doesn’t track her periods, so I don’t see the point. She doesn’t have any evidence at all for this claim, and I don’t see how a cell phone signal could trigger menstruation, so she lacks even a hypothetical mechanism.

And then we get to her chilling last line…

I checked the lab. No, they’re all there and are fine.

I’m also not menstruating.

Somebody has a filthy mind

Is it the French? See that image on the right? That’s a Phrygian cap, and it was the inspiration for the mascot for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“It’s the symbol of liberty, and it’s also a very strong message linked to the revolution that we want for those games. We want those games (to be) a big success,” says three-time Olympic champion canoeist Tony Estanguet, who is the Paris 2024 president.

Silly, but cute. But wait. There’s a different interpretation.

Fair enough, Mr Estanguet, but on closer inspection, it’s also a very strong message linked to the female anatomy. Because the mascots – quite aside from looking like lunatic Smurf hats – unmistakably resemble gurning plush clitorises with the cold dead eyes of a killer, who could be right at home in a particularly traumatic Cronenbergian fever dream.

Huh? What? That’s a stretch. It only fits if you have an image of a vivisected, chopped out deep chunk of a woman’s genitalia in your head. I don’t. That’s not at all what I picture if I try to visualize a clitoris. Somebody has the gross mind of a serial killer.

But I was wrong. It’s not the French. The people responsible for bringing up this stupid comparison are the English at the Vagina Museum, a London-based exhibition. The English are trying to corrupt the innocent French!