But wow, the changes in the latest edition are stunning. This is the description for the standard “Human” player:
Looks like Wizards of the Coast have been completely overrun by SJWs. We’re going to have to start calling them Wizards+.
This is good, if I were to play that game again, there’d be fewer turdlumps wrecking the session.
Yesterday, I showed off a few embryos I’d collected from my fish tanks that morning — they were at roughly the 16 cell stage. Then today, I put up a video of the same beast at 24 hours old. It was a bit busy, because this is the age when they are going through all kinds of spontaneous muscle contractions, so I also anesthetized one of its siblings and tossed that on the scope. Stoned fish are so much more cooperative.
We’ve got know-nothings railing about trigger warnings, which they don’t understand, and safe spaces, which they also get wrong, but what about no-platforming, in which an institution bows to pressure and denies a speaker a place to say their piece? I’m generally sympathetic to their concerns — we should be encouraging diverse views — but let’s think it through. Sometimes, maybe, there is no virtue in asking someone to present their ideas.
Having unusual (or frighteningly mainstream) ideas does not justify getting paid. You might not warrant censorship, but you are also not entitled to a $100,000 speaking fee. That one is easy.
But what about this? Brock Turner, the guy who raped an unconscious woman and got off with a 3 month jail sentence because he was a Stanford athlete, wants to do a speaking tour of college campuses, warning them of the dangers of alcohol. I am just fine with a university telling a convicted sex offender “Hell, no, we’re not going to bring you here to blame your crimes on alcohol”. He might even get invitations to speak, but it won’t because he’s presenting a valuable lesson — he’ll only be invited by assholes who want to troll feminists on campus, all under the guise of the absolute purity of untrammeled free speech.
So where do you draw the line between free speech and abuse of free speech?
I’ve been reminding everyone for 12 years now that Paul Nelson made a specific, quantifiable creationist claim and failed to deliver a promised explanation. This is not unusual. Jeffrey Shallit describes the common elements of the so-called ‘scientific’ creationist, and it’s astonishing how widespread these traits are. One of them is their eagerness to make explicit claims coupled with a reluctance to actually back them up.
The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.
Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.
Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.
Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.
It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?
That sounds so familiar. Maybe if you wait 13 years he’ll show you a calculation? Hope springs eternal!
There are some things you simply aren’t aware of when you’re immersed in an environment — and that’s the case when I was living in Oregon. I don’t recall Dunn Hall, which was one of the campus dorms, but then I didn’t live in the dorms, and was only vaguely aware of the undergraduate students. I never heard any discussion of Frederick Dunn, the guy it was named for, and who was a classics professor in the 1920s. I especially never heard that he was an Exalted Cyclops of the KKK.
But now people are talking about it, and the university is stripping his name from the roster of buildings, prompted by an act of vicious racism.
Student body president Quinn Haaga urged the trustees to act in the wake of the death of 19-year-old Larnell Bruce in Gresham. The black teenager was purposefully run over by a white supremacist, according to police reports.
“The state of Oregon has a very ugly racist history that was deeply ingrained in our policies and laws,” Haaga told the trustees. “Unfortunately, as this horrible tragedy illustrates, these sentiments are still very alive and well in many parts of the state.”
I know what argument some will use against this: there go the SJWs again, erasing history to signal their virtue, and maybe even comparing it to the erasure from official photos of Communists who lost favor with Stalin. But how can you erase history if you never knew it in the first place? This is an act that acknowledges horrible attitudes that were simply taken for granted. It made me conscious of a founding bigotry that I would otherwise have not known. Eugene is a lovely place to live, but you’re really swimming in a sea of whiteness while you are there (I live there for 8 years), and it’s easy to oblivious to Oregon’s history of sundown towns and anti-black laws.
But here’s one person who defended Dunn.
UO alumnus David Igl made an unsuccessful plea to retain Dunn’s name, saying the professor was involved with civic organizations — such as the YMCA and the Methodist Episcopal Church — that would be antithetical to the KKK’s views. He said Dunn was “a victim of some swindlers called the KKK.”
Hucksters from the South, Igl said, recruited KKK members in Eugene in the 1920s, using fear and bigotry as motivators to part townspeople from their money, but the townspeople soon were disillusioned.
Dunn didn’t repudiate his membership, as far as historians can tell, but Igl contends that few Klansmen did out of fear of the so-called invisible empire of the organization.
Oh, right. No racism in Oregon, just high-minded civic responsibility. The white founders of Oregon weren’t racist, no sir, it was all imported by sneaky bad people from Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi who crept across our border like reverse carpetbaggers, tainting the virtuous liberal egalitarianism of the pioneers. Except…
When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.
The South is a convenient scapegoat for racism, and yes, it has a history of racism too…but I’ve lived in Northern states, Washington and Oregon and Pennsylvania and now, Minnesota, and the racism is thick and strong here, too. We just don’t see it in action when we’re only hanging out with our white friends, and when we avoid confronting it. I only learned yesterday that there’s a house flying a confederate flag here in Morris, Minnesota — we’re all pretty good at closing our eyes.
I also learned that the University of Oregon is now planning to rename Deady Hall. I didn’t know Dunn, but I certainly knew Deady Hall — it’s the oldest building on campus, very prettily antique, but now I find out that Matthew Deady, one of the founders of the UO (although I knew he was actually opposed to the university system, and didn’t want a university, although he was happy to grab control when it was founded) was pro-slavery.
See? We don’t talk about these uncomfortable facts, until someone waves them in our face, and then we’re all embarrassed and decide that maybe we shouldn’t be naming prominent racists as heroes of our institution.
I played a little more with Periscope in the lab this morning. First, I showed off my microscope, and I figured that that was enough babbling, and then went off to do my usual animal care chores. The fish kind of went wild and spewed out hundreds of eggs today, so I went ahead and put a typical 4 cell embryo on the imaging system. It looked nice! So I was going to wait a bit and let it divide and show an 8 cell embryo (powers of 2, they really do that), but the next division was in the plane of the screen, so I waited just a little longer and grabbed a picture of a 16 cell embryo. They’re just cruising along, as they do, dividing and dividing.
I also found it really hard to do microscopy one handed while aiming the iPad camera with the other, so you may get a little seasick watching the videos. Sorry. I may have to draft Mary to pretend to be a tripod while I do my schtick tomorrow.
Yep, tomorrow. I’ve got this big pile of blastulae today, and people don’t believe me when I say they’ll turn into little baby fishies in less than 24 hours, so I promised to come back and show everyone what these same embryos look like on Friday morning.
Gary Johnson didn’t have a chance of winning the presidency, anyway.
I’d say goodbye, except there’s another candidate who has continuously demonstrated appalling ignorance who is currently running in second place, so I don’t really think this will make any difference at all. Sadly.
This is Jana Shortal. She’s a Minnesota TV news reporter.
She recently reported on a news story that’s really shaking up the state. Decades ago, before my time, Jacob Wetterling, a young boy, was abducted at gun point, and ever since, his family has been searching for him. This was huge news locally; long-time residents are surprisingly familiar with the case, which caused emotional ripples all across the region when it happened. And then, just recently, the kidnapper confessed, and in wrenching detail, described how he molested and murdered a crying little boy. It has brought up a lot of horrified responses, which are entirely understandable.
Shortal reported on the story.
Then a gossip columnist for the Star Tribune, CJ, reported on the reporting, and complained about Shortal’s clothes. Her jeans were inappropriate
.
Shortal has responded very effectively — you can tell who is the better writer — but still…you’ve got a murdered child, and CJ made it into a fashion statement, as a story that was all about the pants? Remember, it isn’t about how you feel or what you say, what matters is whether the clothing you wear is sufficiently conservative when you say it.
And the thing is, there was absolutely nothing offensive or disrespectful about how Shortal was dressed. That’s what she wears to work. It’s not radical, it’s not trying to shock viewers, it was a pair of jeans.
Caine is off at the Standing Rock camp, and I’m glad FtB has someone right in the thick of things. Look for more photos soon!
