Feeling existential today

And now, back to grading.

But wait.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful office
And you may tell yourself
These are not my beautiful papers.

Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…

And you may ask yourself
Am I right?…Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself yourself
My God!…What have I done?!

Sorry. Lost it for a few minutes there. And now…I must go feed the fish.

Tom Wolfe’s great contribution to literature

Wolfe wrote this execrable book in which he denied evolution, among other very silly things. It was simply entirely wrong and built on a foundation of shoddy scholarship and vainglorious ignorance.

But I do have to credit him with one thing: he has inspired some of the most entertaining book reviews ever. I haven’t seen stuff like this since Twain’s review of Fenimore Cooper. Go enjoy EJ Spode’s review of The Kingdom of Speech.

The word for Niki was VIVID

nikimassey

I first met Niki Massey several years ago — I think it was at Convergence that this force of nature asserted herself to me. She got this response a lot, I suspect; you’d meet her and be staggered by this sassy, loud, laughing, determined woman, and you’d know she was going to be whirling back to bounce off you again in the near future.

Except now she’s not.

Niki died unexpectedly in her sleep this weekend, and now I’m seeing this far-flung community of skeptics and atheists, and also all of her friends in the Minneapolis area, simply reeling in dismay. She was too young. She was too fierce. This can’t have happened. But it did, because death doesn’t give a damn about what you want.

All I can say is that I will remember Niki. I can’t help it, she won’t let me, she was unforgettable.

niki

Trump didn’t pay any taxes because he was a bad businessman

It wasn’t because he was smart. It was because he was an incompetent who hired cunning accountants.

The NY Times was mailed copies of Trump’s tax returns from 1995. His businesses had failed so spectacularly that year that he lost almost a billion dollars, which would have alllowed him to pay no taxes for the next twenty years.

Trump is claims that he “knows the tax code far better than anyone who has run for president,” but even that is a lie. His former accountant reveals that all he knew was how to let others manage his money.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Mitnick said he could not divulge details of Mr. Trump’s finances without Mr. Trump’s consent. But he did talk about Mr. Trump’s approaches to taxes, and he contrasted Fred Trump’s attention to detail with what he described as Mr. Trump’s brash and undisciplined style. He recalled, for example, that when Donald and Ivana Trump came in each year to sign their tax forms, it was almost always Ivana who asked more questions.

But if Mr. Trump lacked a sophisticated understanding of the tax code, and if he rarely showed any interest in the details behind various tax strategies, Mr. Mitnick said he clearly grasped the critical role taxes would play in helping him build wealth. “He knew we could use the tax code to protect him,” Mr. Mitnick said.

This hypocritical sexist turd with no economic competency at all and no experience in politics is the Republican candidate for president? Let’s all just shake our heads in disgust and say “no”.

Best cameo ever

I just watched Luke Cage on Netflix, and it was awesome (no spoilers, don’t worry). One of the nicest surprises, though, was that there was no Stan Lee cameo. Instead, they had…

Method Man. Just blew me away.

From now on, in all the Marvel movies, I want to see the Wu-Tang Clan represented. I’ll settle for nothing less.

Sometimes, it actually is a good idea to sit back and shut up

We actually thought about going out to the Standing Rock camp to show our support a few weeks ago, but ultimately decided against it — I didn’t want us to be that pair of white tourists showing up to nod appreciatively at the spectacle, and getting in the way of the protest. I also last had training in peaceful protesting a couple of decades ago, which was recently enough to know that it is a very serious business with its own rules and discipline, and long enough ago that I wouldn’t take it for granted that I knew what I was doing. So we stayed home, and I made a donation instead.

Caine describes how some people are Not Helping at the protest. Now I’m even more relieved that I didn’t go and be another meddler in the way. Guess I’d better make another donation.

(By the way, Caine also mentions how she doesn’t have the stereotypical Indian look, and is easily mistaken for European. I know about this as well, and it’s important not to go the other way: UMM has a significant percentage of Indian students, and you learn fast that “Gee, you don’t look Indian” is not a compliment, and that you shouldn’t assume that someone with a German last name, for instance, isn’t Indian. It turns out that Indians look…human.)

Who knew books could be divided into just two categories?

maryshelley

Here are six books that come highly recommended: the were on the Royal Society shortlist for the Insight Investment Science Book Prize this year. I’ve got two of them, I should probably add some more.

The Most Perfect Thing by Tim Birkhead
The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson
Cure by Jo Marchant
The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Notice anything about the range of books and authors?

My first thought was that hey, 5 of the 6 are about biology or the environment. Excellent!

The winner is the book by Andrea Wulf, which raised a curious concern in the mind of an editor at The Guardian — by gosh, 2 of the 6 were written by women. Isn’t that remarkable? As he notes, women haven’t normally been recognized for science writing.

In the previous 10 years, only three out of 60 Royal Society shortlistees were female, with precisely zero women appearing on the shortlist between 2010 and 2013.

An injustice is slowly being corrected, I would say. But that’s not the interpretation Dugdale reaches for, strangely. As Tom Levenson (note: one of runners-up for the prize) notices:

Five days after the award was announced, John Dugdale, the associate media editor of The Guardian, wrote a piece that asked “Why have women finally started winning science book prizes?” You might think: Good question! Women have been writing great science books for a long time now. Why haven’t more of them been recognized?

But that’s not why Dugdale asked the question. According to him, the Royal Society caved to pressure created by the example of another “more female-friendly” prize. His piece suggests that the judges’ taste is shifting from “male” approaches to science writing that emphasize “a problem, a mystery, or an underexplored scientific field,” towards a feminine tendency “to focus on people.”

My jaw dropped at that clumsy attempt to impose a peculiar gender essentialism on science writing. Levenson must be exaggerating. But no, that’s exactly what he said.

So perhaps female science writers are more likely to focus on people, while their male counterparts are more likely to address a problem, a mystery or an underexplored scientific field.

He goes further to somehow divide the attendees at the awards ceremony by sex. Somehow, he thinks there is some significant difference between these books based on the sex of the author, which is just plain weird.

The men on the shortlist introduced books about geo-engineering, eggs, the hunt for a non-existent planet and the history of genes. In contrast, Wulf enthused about her globetrotting genius and Jo Marchant read a passage from her exploration of mind-over-body healing, Cure – the only extract that reached for the messy subjectivity of the first person.

Has he even read these books? There’s just no way to split them into only two categories in a way that neatly segregates the Wulf and Marchant books into a common pigeonhole. Maybe he sensed a magical “estrogen vibe” at the ceremony that then suffused the books. Or maybe I had failed to notice that the authors of books written in the first person, like American Psycho, Fight Club, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, Post Office, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were all women. The surprising things you can learn from media editors at major newspapers…

Also, don’t miss GrrlScientists scathing takedown of Dugdale.

Skepticism is so easily displaced by fantasy

We’ve seen it so many times before, you think we’d learn. The glib, charismatic con man, short on evidence but long on vision. The desirable dream: cure my fatal disease, show me proof of an afterlife, teach me how to unleash my psychic powers. We’re supposed to be good at recognizing those, and rejecting them. But it turns out that the con man just needs to tailor his fantasy to fit, and he can reach even the hard core skeptics. In this case, it’s the vision of shiny spaceship and a voyage to Mars.

mars

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