Surprise, the Earth is a globe

I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.

This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.

GLADIIATOR

I feel like I need to apologize for whatever smug twit thought it was clever to put that “II” in the middle of “Gladiator”. Its appearance in the title card was, however, the last bit of wit in this entire movie, and was also representative of the botched, gimmicky plot of the sequel.

First, the historical background, even though it really doesn’t matter. In the early 200s CE, Caracalla, a Gallic soldier, was emperor of Rome for about 20 years; his brother, Geta, was briefly co-ruler before he was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard. Caracalla himself was also murdered by the Praetorian Guard, and was succeeded by Macrinus, the Praetorian prefect, who only ruled for about a year before he lost a battle near Antioch and got himself executed. There. That’s more history than you need, because this movie is going to jettison everything but the names and compress everything down to a couple of days one summer in Rome. Time has no meaning.

The gladiiator in the title is a soldier who is captured in the battle which led to Rome conquering Numidia…sometime around 200 CE. Wasn’t Numidia annexed by the Emperor Augustus, somewhat before then? No matter, this isn’t history. He’s hauled off to Rome as a slave, thrown into the arena, and kills a mangy monkey (I’m not belittling the accomplishment, it really is one hideous, terrifying baboon with huge fangs and a temper, so good on him.) The emperors, a pair of drooling psychopathic halfwits that I mentally labeled as Short Ed Sheeran and Tall Ed Sheeran, were impressed, as were some rebellious senators, as was his mom. It turns out that Gladiiator is the son of the gladiator from the first movie! It’s a hereditarian miracle!

Anyway, there are some more fights in the arena, including a spectacular naval battle. Tall Ed Sheeran gets murdered, and then Short Ed Sheeran gets murdered, and then, somehow, Gladiiator gets a legion to march on Rome, which is confronted by a Roman legion. The ending gets very confusing as Gladiiator is teleporting all over the place to wherever the plot finds convenient; also, Rome seems to be very tiny, as he ends up posing by the singular Gate of Rome, with the whole city laid out behind him, which is mostly empty except for one prominent feature, the Colosseum, of course.

In a climax fitting for a Marvel superhero movie, the cunning, scheming, clever primary bad guy gets on a horse and gallops to the space between the two legions, dismounts, and gets into a one-on-one swordfight with the monkey-killing gladiiator. It made no sense. Nothing in this movie makes sense. Time and space are meaningless. Murderous ridiculous clowns can rule the world, which is at least believable now in the 21st century.

I was not entertained.

Benjamin Dixon murders the Young Turks

Someone call the police, this was a brutal execution.

Actually, never mind. I never cared much for Cenk Uygur or Ana Kasparian, never subscribed to the Young Turks, gave them at best a little side-eye, so I’m not at all surprised at their steady drift from progressive liberal, sort of, to apologists for MAGA.

I won’t miss them. Maybe some real progressives will benefit as money shifts away from this annoying pair.

The journal Intelligence really needs to change its name

That’s a journal I would never trust — after all, they were responsible for publishing Richard Lynn’s hacky paper on the IQ of nations. Now here’s another example of a terrible racist paper from it. It’s an evolutionary psychology paper by Kanazawa, a terrible combination that ought not to ever pass peer review.

On the basis of his theory of the evolution of intelligence (Kanazawa, 2004), Kanazawa (2008) proposed that, during their evolutionary travels away from the relatively stable and hence predictable environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; i.e., the African savanna of the late Pleistocene), the ancestors of Eurasians encountered evolutionarily novel environments that selected for higher intelligence. Therefore, Kanazawa (2008) predicted higher average IQ scores in countries located farther away from the EEA. Kanazawa (2008) tested this hypothesis against data gathered by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006), who estimated so-called “national IQ-scores,” i.e., the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms. Kanazawa (2008) found a significant negative correlation between countries’ national IQs and their distance from three geographic locations in and around sub-Saharan Africa.

This is from a paper analyzing the problems of peer review, using Kanazawa’s paper as a case study. That evo-psych paper flew through peer review, with reviewers missing a number of deep problems.

We point to a number of indisputable issues that should have precluded publication of the paper as constituted at the time of review. First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait. This assumption contradicts the received view on evolutionary population genetics and the main theme of the book (Oppenheimer, 2004) that was cited by Kanazawa (2008) in support of the Out-of-Africa theory. Third, the study is based on the assumption that the IQ of current-day Australians, North Americans, and South Americans is representative of that of the genetically unrelated indigenous populations that inhabited these continents 10,000 years ago (Wicherts et al., 2010b). In related work by others who share Kanazawa’s (2008) views on the nature of race differences in IQ, the latter issue was dealt with by excluding countries with predominantly non-indigenous populations (Templer and Arikawa, 2006). Thus, although Wicherts et al. (2010b) raised additional issues that may the topic of debate (see below), these three problems are beyond dispute.

I am amused that Kanazawa’s methodology assumed that the Earth is flat and that all peoples ignored geographical obstacles, like mountains and oceans, to make a beeline to their modern location. I am horrified that anyone would use Lynn’s deeply racist and wrong paper to make any estimates of a population’s intelligence. I reject the whole notion of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence in the first place.

The authors propose some changes towards a more open peer review process, which sound good to me. My simpler solution is to simply throw out the whole goddamn journal of Intelligence, along with anyone who publishes in it.

Speaking of flat earth follies, I see that YouTube is in a tizzy because someone is doing something called “The Final Experiment” — a group of people are flying to Antarctica to witness the fact that there is a period where the sun never sets, which ought to be impossible if Antarctica is actually a ring of land surrounding the whole planet. It’s ridiculous. No, flat earthers will find a new excuse and will not be persuaded by a “final” experiment — it’s not as if they reached their beliefs by experiment and reason in the first place, or as if all the other evidence that the earth is roughly spherical were insufficient.

Can you imagine someone proposing a “final experiment” to “prove” that life on earth evolved? I can’t. I know the idiots who are creationists far too well to think that.

TODAY: Freethoughtbloggers discuss the problem of evil

Just in time for your Christmas shopping list!

It seems obvious today that people are operating on different principles for defining good and evil. Some people seem to believe that it’s virtuous to massacre Palestinian children, strangle homeless people on the subway, murder healthcare CEOs (or deprive people of health care), and oppress trans people. All those things would put you on my naughty list! What are the rules for ethics and morality anyway? Are there any?

I’m going to have to reorganize everything

One of the perks of my position is that every two years I get a shiny new computer. I got my new one installed this morning.

That’s my usual work station. I’ve got a Wild M3 on the left, a nice Leica next to it, then this laptop with dual monitors spilling out the front because there is a mercury arc lamp hidden behind it, and then a giant black box with a Raspberry PI we use for behavioral observations. This isn’t going to work. It’s nice to have all the tools in one place, but I guess the PI black box is going to have to be relocated.

Or I’m going to have to take over another lab! Nah, compact and accessible is the way to go.

Sexual dimorphism — it’s scary

This is a female Latrodectus mactans.

This is a male Latrodectus mactans.

I brought them together this morning. The female is plump and mature. The male has large, engorged palps. This is what they look like together.

They did not mate today, although the male spent a lot of time scurrying around and tentatively plucking at the web. At least she didn’t eat him. I put a video of the anxious, fruitless male on my Patreon.

I left them to honeymoon overnight. I’ll check on them tomorrow.

One habit I wish we could break

I guess I need to inform my family that I don’t want them to surprise me with a shiny new car in the driveway for Christmas — you know, like those commercials where a grinning husband surprises his oblivious wife, who apparently makes no contribution to family economic decisions, with a monster SUV, which always has a bright red bow on top. I think those commercials are clear evidence that some huge purchases are not made rationally, but as status symbols or weird nuptial gifts.

Anyway, I don’t want a new car now or any time in the foreseeable future, and I definitely don’t want a “popular” vehicle, the kind of monster machine that everyone seems to be buying and driving on the roads around me. There’s an ongoing idiotic trend that can only end when everyone is driving a tank.

Like a disease, car bloat is spreading. The United States is patient zero: 4 out of 5 new cars in the U.S. are now SUVs or pickups, a sharp increase from a few decades ago. Now, oversized cars are becoming almost as common in Berlin and Beijing as they are in Baltimore. SUVs alone comprised nearly half of car sales worldwide in 2023, up from 20 percent 15 years ago. The global ascent of giant cars is an ominous trend for climate change, as well as for road safety in the rich and developing worlds alike.

I use the term “car bloat” to describe the confluence of two trends that have transformed the U.S. automotive market. First, SUVs and pickups have supplanted standard sedans and station wagons, both of which the Big Three carmakers no longer offer to American consumers. Second, existing car models have steadily expanded in weight and size. The bestselling F-150 pickup, for instance, added 800 pounds, 7 inches of height, and 15 inches of length between 1991 and 2023.

Two reasons are given for this annoying and dangerous trend: consumers want high status cars, and manufacturers want to sell high profit machines.

Some of this growth is due to shifting customer demand, particularly in countries like China, where SUVs are “perceived as symbols of wealth and status.” But consumer preferences explain only part of the story.

“Automakers have a fair bit of culpability,” said Colin McKerracher, an Oslo-based analyst at BloombergNEF who focuses on the transport sector. “They’ve spent much of the last decade advertising bigger cars, and that’s because they make significantly higher profit margins on their SUVs and pickups than they do on sedans. They’ve told a story—‘Oh, this is what customers are asking us to build’—but it’s quite a coincidence that the models customers want make a higher margin.”

Yeah, people make bad decisions and corporations make evil ones. But how to end it? I think there’s one answer: regulation and taxation. Deflate the status seeking by making it clear that buying a giant car is stupid — we can see that already with the cybertruck, which is an object of mockery when they show up on the road (but people still buy them, because people are not rational) — and taxation can reduce the incentives to buy one.

After being caught flat-footed, some European governments are now moving to restrain car bloat through taxation. Norway and France, for instance, impose vehicle purchase charges that scale with weight and emissions, adding the equivalent of thousands of dollars to the price of an oversized car. These fees can have a major impact: In Norway, a 2023 rule applying weight-based fees to the biggest electric cars caused sales of the Hongqi, a gargantuan Chinese SUV, to collapse.

McKerracher applauds such moves. “Fuel economy rules are really, really important,” he said. “You need governments to regulate average fuel economy and push automakers, because they won’t improve on their own.” (Note to Americans: Project 2025, the de facto playbook of the Trump administration, calls for relaxing fuel economy rules that President Joe Biden has strengthened.)

Of course the Republicans will wreck everything, because they’re idiots. The article also mentions that the US is scaling emission standards to the size of the truck, making bloated cars easier to meet the standards.

Also, let’s kill those car commercials that make big fast cars look sexy and adventurous, just like we banned cigarette commercials. Not that that can happen with the incoming administration.

Why I like Seattle

I just finished a flurry of contract signing — my mother’s house is thiiiis close to being sold. We have a final hurdle of getting the lender’s approval, but my agent says there’s only like a 10% chance that they might have an objection. I’ll be surprised if all the dotted lines are signed by the new year, but otherwise, everything is imminent.

Also, this is Seattle.

Someone hacked the traffic signs. Keep it up, you weird radicals!

One more day

I’m almost finished. A lot of papers have been graded, and all that’s left now is an online final exam for my intro bio course, which has a deadline of 1:00 tomorrow. Now I wait for those finals to be submitted, and then…a few hours of grading, and all is complete.

Also tomorrow I have some end-of-term stuff to wrap up. I’m getting a new computer in the lab, I have to meet a few students who I’ll be working with next semester, I have to do some maintenance on the fly lines we’ll be working with in genetics next term, and then the aforementioned final grading…then I guess I’ll slack off for a day.

Oh, and maybe some spider breeding.