What a strange feeling…

I’m not used to this. I’m accustomed to deep disappointment the day after an election, but this year, the results all rolled my way.

Amy Klobuchar won the DFL nomination for governor. I told you, she’s a machine, she got about 90% of the votes. She’ll be competing with Republican Lisa Demuth, not Mike Lindell. Lindell was a joke, Klobuchar will have to work a little harder to beat Demuth.

Peggy Flanagan is the DFL choice for the senate, and will be running against Michele Tafoya, who I know nothing about. Either way, Minnesota will have a woman governor and senator in November.

In my local house election, it will be Erik Osberg vs. the odious Michelle Fischbach.

There we go, my record this year is 100% successful predictions. Of course, that was just the primaries, there’s still time for crushing failure and disappointment in a few months.

Who is Adam Bly?

I just did an interview with a journalist who is trying to answer that question. I was not very helpful. I knew Adam Bly as a publisher and promoter of science popularizers — he’s the guy who created Seed Magazine and Scienceblogs, once upon a time, and I met him several times, and he paid me extravagant sums to write Pharyngula and stories for Seed. Good times.

But today I learned that Jeffrey Epstein owned a 26% stake in Seed Media.

I knew that Bly was a kind of wunderkind in cancer research, but I didn’t know much else about him. I didn’t even know what specific research he was known for.

In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.

He began his career at the age of 16 as the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years studying the biochemistry of cancer, specifically the role of cell adhesion in metastasis. Out of the lab, he founded Seed – tag-lined “Science is Culture™” – and served as its Editor-in-Chief. “

What I did know was that he abruptly erupted out of Canada, moved to New York City, and was somehow shuffling millions of dollars around in various scientific enterprises. None of us sciencebloggers had any idea where all his money was coming from, but we accepted it. We should have known it was too good to be true.

Anyway, Scienceblogs and Seed Media folded in 2010-2011, but we’d seen presentiments in 2009, when the company was showing financial strain, and the ads were becoming increasingly obnoxious, culminating in the notorious PepsiGate disaster, in which Bly sold out to PepsiCo and revealed himself as a corporate shill. The diaspora followed, with bloggers (including myself and Ed Brayton, who generated most of the traffic to Scienceblogs) abandoning it to move to other sites.

Looking back, I can see a suggestive correlation. Seed Media was getting desperate for new financial backing in 2009; Jeffrey Epstein was locked up (under the cushiest of conditions) in 2008-2009. Another person who was suffering Epstein withdrawal at that time was John Brockman:

Although Epstein was evidently no intellectual (physicist Sean Caroll described him as “a standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out big words with no real understanding”), he had a knack for Machiavellian manipulations tied to gifts and favors. In a travesty of potlatch ceremonies, the gifts that the academics brought to the parties were not intended just for Epstein but also for his clan of billionaires and celebrities. The ceremonies were held at opulent intellectual ‘salons’ funded by Epstein. A literary agent by the name of John Brockman was responsible for organizing many of these salons under the guise of a club called the Edge, which facilitated the gathering of billionaires and academics at “glittering events.” Some of these events were apparently secretive safe spaces for participants to praise “race science, rape culture and genetic engineering.” It was through Brockman’s bragging about his association with Epstein to a former client (tech writer Evgeny Morozov) that details of former Prince Andrew’s alleged foot massage emerged.

The so-called Billionaire’s Dinners and various ‘salons’ seem to have faded away as Epstein’s reputation began to poison the events. I was not involved in any of that, I’m relieved to say; I was on Brockman’s mailing list and was invited to contribute to some of his books of essays, but I was not insider enough to be invited to any of his salons with Pinker. Edge is now described as “cult-like”, so fortunately I did not fall into it. I was only on his list for about a year before I was dropped without fanfare.

Would you believe those dinners were almost entirely funded by Epstein”? Or that Brockman attended a party at Epstein’s mansion to celebrate his release from prison?

Now what about Adam Bly? I heard Brockman describe him as his protege, but have no idea how the Bly-Brockman-Epstein axis formed. There’s a big story lurking here.

Would an AI lie to you?

I don’t recall ever seeing services that offered to do all your research for you, and to write the paper for you, so now I’m feeling old. Such services exist, though. One is called Research Gold — you just tell them your thesis, they dig into the library, and they return a complete, fully written paper that you can then submit to win academic honor and glory.

Research Gold, a site that advertises services for advertises services for medical researchers, including drafting peer-review ready manuscripts , including systemic reviews and meta-analyses, claims that it’s “100% human-written, never AI,” and lists a number of PhD reviewers and professional methodologists on staff that carry out this meticulous, difficult work.

There’s something else I haven’t seen before, that peculiar need to reassure customers that nosir, I’m no AI. I am a human. You can trust me. Except…

The problem: The PhD reviewers Research Gold lists on its site are AI-generated and don’t exist. Other methodologists it lists are real, but are not aware their identity is being used by Research Gold. When I tried calling the company, an AI agent that refused to concede it was AI answered and kept trying to sell me Research Gold’s services. Email and chat communication with the company were also AI generated.

It’s 100% AI through and through! But I might be tempted to use an AI to brute-force its way through a literature review — I’ve done the thing where you get on PubMed and throw keywords at it to try and find all the papers relevant to your interests. It’s the kind of novel search I’ve thought could be automated, and which would churn out a long list of potential papers for human review and evaluation. I’m not the only one who has thought that.

Sebastian Rowan, a PhD candidate in University of New Hampshire’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering first told me about Research Gold after he stumbled into it while preparing to defend his dissertation. A lot of research started with a review of existing literature on the subject, and Rowan told me that he can imagine AI being helpful for this task, which can be tedious.

The problem is hallucinations — an AI will blithely make up citations to papers that don’t exist. Nowadays, when I review papers, I have to check all the citations to see if they were real, which never used to be a problem.

So even at a task where you would think an AI would excel, it makes the problem even worse.

No thanks, Research Gold. Change your name to Research Shit.

This is what happens when you let a senile fool run the country

The next distraction:

We’re at war with Iran, but that’s not enough to hide Trump’s crimes. How about going to war with a NATO ally? The invasion of Greenland has begun.

An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities.

As the US president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.

Greenland has protested and told them to get out of there, but the drilling companies are ignoring the demands. US companies have hired their very best to promote the plan to invade.

Greenland Energy has retained Phil McGraw, better known as Dr Phil, a prominent rightwing former chatshow host who served on Trump’s religious freedom commission, to make a documentary series that will “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters”.

It has also appointed as a director a US navy veteran who is working on Golden Dome, the missile defence plan for which Trump says controlling Greenland is “vital”.

Larry Swets, Greenland Energy’s chair and a big shareholder, appears to enjoy access to Trump’s circle. He has said the oil project is “not related to American annexation”.

As usual, the Trump administration picks the most incompetent charlatans to do their dirty work. That’s a key step in building a pretext: send some bumbling boob in who will antagonize the people and provoke a response that can be used to justify sending in the Marines.

And fucking Dr Phil? A washed-up, lying hack? Why is he being hired to do anything? Oprah has a lot to answer for.

It’s Minnesota Primary Day!

I’m getting out to vote this afternoon, and generally my choices are straightforward. I’m voting for Peggy Flanagan for the US Senate; she’s vying with Angie Craig, who has made some bad decisions, for instance, pandering to the crypto boys. Flanagan will be a good progressive.

For my local state representative, I will vote for practically anyone against the horrid Republican, Michelle Fischbach. She’s probably going to win, because we live in a deep red district, but we’ve got to choose between two DFL candidates, Erik Osberg and Steve Carlson. I’m voting for Osberg, a 54 year old kid, rather than Carlson, who is too old for the job at 75. Carlson is also a fanatical anti-choice advocate which is sufficient to make me detest him.

Probably the highest profile race is for Governor. We have a swarm of 7 people trying to serve as our DFL leader. I worry that one pair will get a significant number of votes purely on the basis of their names: Ole “Viking” Savior and Ashley “Skol” Johnson. Every election we get some weird fringe candidates, and having the name “Johnson” and a Scandinavian connection always gives an unearned boost. I think Amy Klobuchar is going to steamroll everyone else — she has the election machine. I know that ridiculous clown, Mike Rindell, is on the Republican side, and he might get that nomination, but I don’t think he has chance in the main election in November.

I don’t expect any drama from a Minnesota election, but we’ll do our duty.

What did I live on in the years from 0 to 30?

It’s lunch hour, on my first day back at full-time work, and I’m thinking about food. I’m in transition; all summer I’ve been mostly at home, in part because I’ve been laid up by knee surgeries and some surgeries, but that excuse doesn’t work any more because I’m mostly recovered. My wife has been working a regular 7-3 workday most days, so I’ve gradually evolved into a house-husband. I do most of the cooking, and also laundry and dishwashing…yeah, you could say I’m whipped. And that’s OK. After years of leaving most of the housework to my wife, I’m gaining a new appreciation of household labor.

One of the things I was thinking about was that I’ve got it pretty easy now, since it’s just me and my wife cooperating to run the house. Two people. Simple. Manageable. But still a real amount of work, and while I enjoy cooking, I don’t enjoy cleaning up the aftermath, even though it must be done.

But then it struck me: my parents had six kids, one after another, and I realized that I didn’t see a sink piled high with dirty dishes until I moved out and lived alone and was a lazy sloppy bachelor. My late mother must have had a system: with as many dirty dishes as 8 people would produce at every meal, she must have been diligent about not letting them accumulate — I had never properly appreciated all the labor my mother must have invested in basic maintenance. Thanks, Mom, I’m sorry I never said so while you were alive.

It also made me appreciate the reason that my parents almost divorced when I was 7 or 8 years old. Mom wanted to get a job outside the home, and Dad reacted with great hostility. He, and the rest of us, were dependent on all that hard work Mom was doing. (They must have figured out how to manage the situation, because they reconciled, and Mom got a part time job at Boeing.)

Remember, though, I was thinking about food, and I was trying to remember what Mom did for dinner. Eight places were set at the table, and she had to provide bowls of food we’d have to pass around and serve ourselves…something. That’s where I drew a blank. What the heck was I eating while growing up?

Maybe you have a better recollection than I do. I was getting mostly forgettable, bland food.

There was a very anthropological distinction between my parents’ roles. Dad did the glamorous, high protein stuff: a big slab of smoked salmon, a beach trip where we’d come back with buckets of clams, barbecue in the summer. But that was an occasional treat, not even every week. Mom would do the basic low-budget, economical stuff every day, which now I’ve mostly forgotten. Lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, cereal for breakfast, and potatoes, corn, broccoli, etc. for bulk at dinner, and I recall tuna casserole a few times a week (which was OK, I liked tuna casserole), but probably the most memorable favorite was putti klub, a potato dumpling wrapped around a bit of meat, and then sliced and fried and soaked in maple syrup. We also had a filling stew with root vegetables and mystery meat (I knew exactly what it was, heart or tongue, cheap organ meats, cubed and cooked to be unrecognizable), and sometimes a platter of breaded pork chops, or better still, liver and onions. I used to terrify my kids with threats of serving liver and onions for dinner, because I actually liked it, while they were grossed out at the very idea.

But man, the work involved in making meals for 8 people every day, and doing it on a very tight budget–I couldn’t do that.

Now you might be thinking that I had 3 kids and had to have known the struggle of feeding 5 people every day, but I don’t. I remember cans and boxes from the grocery store, and that’s about it. Maybe I could ask them what they remember, but I think they all died of malnutrition, kwashiorkor, beriberi, rickets, and scurvy, and even if they had survived, wouldn’t have good memories of family meals.

How about you? Do you have fond memories of good food on the table?

It’s that time

Time to go to…work. I have to go into my lab/office and get my class in order for the start of Fall term in two weeks.

Oh well. Next year at this time I’ll be retired, and nobody can tell me to go to work ever again. (Also, my “work” is enjoyable stuff anyway.)

As I was walking into work, I spotted a bouquet that reflects my feelings perfectly.

A little more time, and those flowers will be buried in snow, and I won’t have to look at them anymore.

In case you were wondering, Mel Gibson is still a colossal asshole

The fundamental feature of Christianity is that its believers are all committed to the idea they are especially beloved by a super-being, which makes them particularly insufferable. Mel Gibson is the pinnacle of this brand of intrinsic narcissism.

Mel Gibson: I was not chosen by men, nor by Hollywood, nor by the powers of this world.
I was chosen by God.
The Lord put a fire in my bones and a cross on my shoulders.
I will carry it until my last breath.
No darkness, no enemy of this age will stop what Heaven has already decided.

Betty Bowers called it: “Is there a more potent brand of blasphemy than a shitty narcissist claiming they are the way they are all because of God?”

Don’t watch Mel Gibson movies.