What’s with all these photos of animals snuggling up next to capybaras? It’s like they’re the St Francis of the animal world.
There’s got to be some angry creature in the background seething with jealousy, or it’s just not complete. Some Iago. Now I want to meet them.
The first issue of our student paper, the Morris University Register, has come out, and it includes a full page guide for first year LGBTQIA2S+ students. I have a favorite part.
Don’t hide. Morris is a super gay school, so no one will treat you differently.
Hear that, everyone? UMM is super gay. That’s an excellent reason to come here.
Second favorite comment is “The College Republicans have a history of being purposely inflammatory, especially towards our community. Just ignore them.” That tells you how relevant conservatives are here.
We also have a Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future club on campus.
Morris does have some short uplifting slogan on billboards advertising the school, but I have to say…I can never remember what it is. It’s so airy and inoffensive and positive that it’s also utterly forgettable. Now ads that cheerily declared that “Morris is a super gay school!” — those would stand out, and draw in applications from the kind of student we want to encourage, and scare away those we’d rather not see.
Nancy Atkinson will be telling us Incredible Stories From Space in the Common Cup Coffeehouse in downtown Morris, tonight at 6pm. Be there!
I caught a bit of the Graham-Cassidy-Sanders-Klobuchar town hall meeting last night. The Republicans were smarmy liars.
But it doesn’t matter. The latest attempt to kill Obamacare is dead again, not that that will prevent the Republicans from taking more swipes at it.
It’s kind of like a movie, where Obamacare is John Wick, and endless streams of enemies are rushing at him and he manages to avoid getting fatally shot but still pumps a few bullets into one assassin after another.
Sheesh. That analogy for a health care plan kinda went wildly astray, I think.
Christie Wilcox writes about the ecological experiment asking what happens to the environment of a mass die-off, done by dumping 6 tons of dead pigs in a heap in a forest. It’s impressive. The scavengers swoop in and proliferate, and you literally do get heaving, writhing rivers of maggots pouring off the rotting mass.
There is video at the link. I decided not to imbed it since I didn’t know if all of my readers would have finished lunch yet.
Or rather, when creationism is a symptom of profound ignorance that is also manifested in health care woo. It seems that Eric Hovind has been peddling “Vitamin B17” — a bit of quackery he inherited from his con artist father, Kent Hovind. He was recently warned by the FDA that he needs to stop selling it.
The name “Vitamin B17” is an example of lying with labels. It’s not a vitamin. It’s better known as amygdalin, or even more infamously, laetrile. It’s a fake cancer cure that does not work and has never worked. Here’s the summary of this compound from NIH:
Laetrile is another name for the natural product amygdalin, which is a chemical constituent found in the pits of many fruits and in numerous plants.
Hydrogen cyanide is thought to be the main anticancer compound formed from laetrile via in situ release.
Laetrile was first used as a cancer treatment in Russia in 1845, and in the United States in the 1920s.
Laetrile has shown little anticancer activity in animal studies and no anticancer activity in human clinical trials.
The side effects associated with laetrile toxicity mirror the symptoms of cyanide poisoning, including liver damage, difficulty walking (caused by damaged nerves), fever, coma, and death.
Laetrile is not approved for use in the United States.
Inappropriate advertisement of laetrile as a cancer treatment has resulted in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigation that culminated in charges and conviction of one distributor.
Hovind has been criticized for selling snake oil before. All that’s happened is that he’s now a little more circumspect about making false claims about curing cancer with apricot pits, but he is still selling these useless products. In fact, that’s about all he sells in the “health” category on his site, with one addition…he’s selling an anti-vaccination book.
In this book you will read the findings of medical doctors and researchers who tell us that vaccinations are not only unsafe, but they actually work against our God given immune system.
It just goes to show that nothing a creationist says can be trusted, and that you shouldn’t be taking advice from any of the Hovinds on either science or health.
What did we do to our kids? Dahl was a favorite author around our house, and only now am I learning what an unpleasant person he was.
His early writing in the short story form was impacted by the political situation on the world stage. He believed in a world government and he was extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause. His stories were filled with caricatures of greedy Jews. One suggests ” a little pawnbroker in Housditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.” In 1951 he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and luxured in Hitler’s former retreat at Berchtesgaden. His dislike of Jews and especially of Zionists was egged on by Marsh’s Israel hatred, later encapsulated in a revolting letter to Marsh where he mocked the head of East London’s B’Nai B’rith Club.
Suddenly, the Oompa Loompas have context, and it’s not good. When you read how he regarded women, you’ll read The Witches with different eyes, too.
Rebecca Steele was 13 years old when she started her math workbook in 1702. We still have the book, and it’s amazing!
Manuscript mathematical cipher book written in 1701 and 1702 by Rebecca Steele, a young student in Bristol. Pages exemplifying specific mathematical operations and concepts are embellished with calligraphic designs and command-of-hand drawings, and some lessons are dated. Many processes and operations are described in long word problems, including one (p. 30) where Steele is set the problem of figuring her exact age. She gives her birthdate as 28 May 1689 at 8:12pm and the present date as 17 April 1702 at “about 10 in ye morning.” She is likely the Rebecka Steele who appears in Quaker birth records for the city of Bristol as a daughter of William and Melior Steele, born on 28 May 1689 in Thomas Street.
Browse through it online, and you might be astonished. Thirteen year olds nowadays don’t generally have the ability to produce work like it. It’s a math book, but it mostly seems like an exercise book in calligraphy — I imagine that in the early 18th century much of the practice of teaching had to be taken up with mastering the art of quill and brush and ink, and that even when working on something as basic as multiplication tables, there was all this ancillary effort required required to put it on the page, and that there was a great deal of social reward for doing it artfully.
That got me thinking about the Flynn effect, too. Was Rebecca Steel less intelligent than your typical 21st century 13 year old? I rather doubt it. You ought to be impressed at what she was doing in her work book, even if the math seems trivial. But what she was doing was exercising a collection of important skills that wouldn’t make the grade in the standardized tests of today.
It also says something about the enabling effect of the progression of technology. We can pick up a ballpoint pen or a pencil and make marks on plentifully available perfectly white paper, without having to even think about the tech that makes it all possible. There was a time when writing was a complex skill that required an appreciation of the physical properties of ink, of the shape of your pen nib, of the texture of the paper. I’d be utterly confused if someone handed me a bottle of ink and a goose feather, and if I had to write a short note it would be a blotchy mess, and my hands would be smudged black.
I salute you, Rebecca! I wonder what happened to her?
It must be Christmas. Got a pile of packages in the mail all at once today, including some lab stuff (not shown).
I’m looking forward to Twilight of the Gods (maybe this weekend, if I’m a good boy and get my grading done), but does anyone know anything about the Theodora book? I’m always up for learning about Byzantine empresses, but this is one of those things where I didn’t request it, a prescient publisher just thinks I should take a look at it.
Speaking of people we don’t need to hear from ever again…James Damore was interviewed by Thomas Smith, and Damore was an example of posturing aggrieved entitlement. Smith kept pointing out that there are real problems of discrimination, and that there are a number of strategies that companies like Google are trying to use to resolve them, and Damore kept objecting to them either by denying the problems, or by suggesting that these programs should be rejected because they are resented by “some people”, like Libertarians who see them as unfair to white men. If a deplorable doesn’t like something, that’s sufficient to reject it. Damore keeps bring up vague generalities and blanket condemnations of sociology, which he clearly doesn’t understand.
“Sensitivity training is unnecessary!”, the pronouncement of insensitive people everywhere.
Smith keeps his feet to the fire throughout, demanding evidence and asking him to back up assertions. It was annoyingly frustrating because he couldn’t — he just dodges, brings up something irrelevant, and wanders off topic, or piles on more claims that need to be debunked. And near the end, Smith tries to get Damore to defend his claim that “men are more logical than women”, and all Damore can muster is a weird circular argument to simultaneously defend the fact that more men are Libertarian than women, and that Libertarianism is more logical, by pointing out that therefore we’d expect more men would be Libertarian.
I never need to hear from Damore ever again.
