Perfectly innocuous, mundane video inspires hyperbole on the internet

I am mystified — the most trivial things get labeled with extravagant labels on the internet, and I’m experiencing hyperbole fatigue (actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the annoying ads that are generated for this post are full of this crap). The latest example is this “viral video” that is being described as “bizarre“, “uncomfortable“, “revolting“, and “gross“. It’s none of those things. It’s routine and commonplace. It’s just a razor clam on an Oregon beach.

This copy has the most ordinary title: “clam digs into sand”.

My family used to dig for razor clams, and we knew how fast they could burrow. It wasn’t gross, it was wonderful: they dig by anchoring themselves with that muscular foot and expelling water to fluidize the sand around them, and then contracting muscles to pull themselves deeper into the muck, which then firms up around them. They were so fast at burrowing in that you needed special tools to keep up with them — a clam gun, which was a tube you’d push around the clam and then pull up to remove the clam and all the wet sand around it (that could be heavy work), or these narrow shovels that would let you dig fast. We’d walk along the beach or in the shallows, looking for spurts from their siphons or the little dimples they’d leave on the surface, and then you’d race to excavate them before they got away.

Here’s a video from the Washington state parks department on how to dig for razor clams.

They’re delicious, by the way. That clam is just one big hunk of almost pure muscle.

Also, that video shows what I’ve always thought of as a real beach: gray, cloudy, foggy, and wet, and going to the beach meant putting on denim and flannel and good solid boots, getting cold and damp, and coming home to a seafood feast. It was kind of the opposite of glamorous and weird, internet.

One class down

I tackled my big class, genetics, yesterday. Final exam graded, and final grades submitted to the registrar. Two smaller classes to wrap up, probably will get them done today, except that I’ve got another job to do: it’s time for the end-of-the-term lab audits by the discipline safety officer, who is…me. I get to spend my morning checking fire extinguishers and chemical waste containers and ticking check boxes.

Summer is almost here.

It is not pragmatic for a university to suck up to their enemies

I’ve been called tactless, among other things, and it’s a fair cop — I’m not very diplomatic. But I am definitely much more judicious than anyone in the Trump administration, I guess. Trump himself is a blundering nitwit, handling this whole Comey affair like a short-tempered, impulsive twit, and Sean Spicer, who is supposed to be good at public relations, was hiding from the press in the bushes.

And now, it’s Betsy DeVos. Poor Betsy. She gave the commencement address at a historically black college, Bethune-Cookman University. Not only is she the person in charge of dismantling the educational system in this country, but the Trump administration has consistently supported racist policies — Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have I said enough? She should have known what she’d get: students and parents booed her throughout the speech, turned their back on her, and some walked out. It was nuts that she was even there. It was amazingly clueless of her to agree to do it, and even more shocking is that she was invited to give that speech. What was going through the mind of Edison Jackson, president of the university? Not much, it seems. He has given three reasons.

But Jackson has staunchly defended his decision, telling reporters Wednesday, God is on our side, and when he’s for you, what does it matter who’s against you?

WTF? That’s a load of god-bothering fatalism right there. Why bother going to college? In’shallah, God will take care of his own.

He called DeVos’s visit an opportunity to engage and educate the secretary, and said she had met earlier with 12 Bethune-Cookman students who had offered her concrete policy suggestions.

That’s a slightly better reason, but it’s still somewhat delusional. DeVos has a long track record of desiring to happily gut schools, and I don’t think a meeting over lunch is going to change her.

Ah, but here comes the real reason.

But he also presented the decision as pragmatic. We are always about the business of making new friends, Jackson said. Her department controls 80% of the revenue that comes into our school. Why wouldn’t we want to do that?

You don’t want to do that, because her department controls 80% of your revenue. Fight back. Resist. It is inappropriate that these people should have so much power over public education, and it’s administrators who constantly concede greater and greater control who are part of the problem.

The students of Bethune-Cookman University who were vocal in their opposition to this anti-education Education Secretary have more integrity than the president of Bethune-Cookman University.

Look at these students!

My plan for today

I’m all done with classes! But I still have a full schedule. Here’s my day:

  1. Walk down to the gym, put in a half hour or so.

  2. Walk to the coffee shop, plunk my butt down and drink a cup.

  3. Grade.

  4. Grade.

  5. Grade.

  6. Grade.

  7. Grade.

  8. Grade.

  9. Grade.

  10. Grade.

  11. Grade.

  12. Grade.

  13. Grade.

  14. Grade.

  15. Grade.

  16. Grade.

  17. Grade.

  18. Grade.

  19. Go home and pass out.

It is a good plan. It is the best plan.

Suddenly, this seems important

So…when the giant meteor strikes, how will you die? There’s actually a study of potential deaths in an asteroid impact. I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the odds of being instantly disintegrated because you are replaced by a crater are very low; the most likely cause of death is from violent winds and the shock wave. Your house, for instance, will be shattered and you’ll just be one more piece of debris flung outwards amidst a tumbling mass of jagged shards of wood and metal and stone.

This study only analyzed short-term consequences, though. I suspect that even more deaths would follow from exposure and starvation and disease and roving feral gangs of Trumplicans.

The earth was a complicated place for intelligent species a quarter million years ago

When I first heard about Homo naledi, the question at the top of my head was “How old is it?” It was a hominin, it looked fairly primitive with a small brain the size of a gorilla’s, yet it was found in a mass “grave”, where part of the mystery was how so many dead hominins ended up in this difficult-to-reach, hidden cave system in South Africa. The authors didn’t report a date. Speculation ran from 3 million years old to 300 thousand years old, both dates seeming extreme and unlikely.

Now we have a date: between 236,000 and 335,000 years old. Astonishing.

That’s really young. Furthermore, they’ve found another chamber in the cave network with even more bones.

All indications are that this was a thriving population of little, primitive people.

The bones, remarkably, show few signs of disease or stress from poor development, suggesting that Homo naledi may have been the dominant species in the area at the time. “They are the healthiest dead things you’ll ever see,” said Berger.

Homo naledi stood about 150cm tall fully grown and weighed about 45kg. But it is extraordinary for its mixture of ancient and modern features. It has a small brain and curved fingers that are well-adapted for climbing, but the wrists, hands, legs and feet are more like those found on Neanderthals or modern humans. If the dating is accurate, Homo naledi may have emerged in Africa about two million years ago but held on to some of its more ancient features even as modern humans evolved.

It’s still a mystery how all these bones ended up in the caves. These don’t seem to be ceremonial burials, it’s more like they were chucking their dead down some hole to drop them in a deep cave.