I was lucky my family wasn’t god-soaked

I did not like this video. It’s titled “Meet the Evangelical Science Teacher Who Raised an Evolutionist“. It meanders. It’s slow. It’s from the perspective of a rational, evolution accepting person who has a father who is both a science teacher and a committed young earth creationist, and the problem is that it’s trying to humanize this man she loves, and present as much of his view as she can stomach, but everything he clings to is bullshit. She mainly struggles to keep their relationship tolerable, but he is wallowing in evangelical nonsense, soaking in creationist books and videos, and can never break out of his self-constructed pit of ignorance. It’s over an hour long, and the creator doesn’t break out of her own restraint until about an hour in, when she gets into an argument about climate change (he denies that it’s human-caused, of course).

I felt compelled to watch it because it reflects a perspective I don’t have — I grew up in a family that was open-minded and thoughtful. My family wasn’t atheist by any means, but they didn’t have the patience to put up with Christian lies, and I think they avoided church because it would have required that they think about the crap in the Bible, and it was safer to avoid confronting the beliefs they’d been brought up in. I didn’t have a father who sat around listening to old-time gospel hour shows, who had them playing as background noise (and I do mean noise) as he puttered around the house, and who as a consequence rejected scientific evidence. This video was infuriating because the pushback against this stupid man, who was smart enough to teach math to 3rd graders, was so tepid and weak, in spite of the fact that the creator was also infuriated with this old man’s intransigence.

I can only recommend it for people who are curious about what living the evangelical life is like. Short answer: it’s hellishly stupid.

We’ve got epic losers in this state

I told you who won the Minnesota primaries, but I should probably mention the wacky and unloveable losers of that race.

First and foremost is Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy. Despite the fact that Donald Trump endorsed him, he lost by 11 points to Lisa Demuth. Before the election night, he was saying that win or lose, he’d back the Republican nominee. During election night, he was getting visibly flustered as he tried to suggest that the election returns were flawed, and he’d need to examine the data closely, and he refused to concede. Now he’s singing a familiar song.

Mike Lindell, well-versed in denying election results, has cast doubt on his distant second-place primary finish Tuesday night in his effort to secure the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota.
The MyPillow founder, speaking to reporters at his watch party in a downtown Minneapolis hotel after The Associated Press called the race for Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, raised the specter of fraud in the vote count and was not ready to concede the race.
Lindell said there were “deviations (that) came right at the end,” when the final unofficial results came in showing him losing by more than 45,000 votes, or 11%, to Demuth.

You know this is going to be the game plan for every Republican loser come November. How do we know there’s election fraud? Because I lost!

I’m just surprised he got as many votes as he did. He’s a crackpot.

We had another big loser that night: Royce White, a former basketball player (and by all accounts, not a very good one) was running for the Senate. He lost bigly, coming in third place. His dalliance in crazyville was distinguished by his announcement that he was also declaring his eligibility for the WNBA, because he was a transgender woman. He proved it by putting on a wig.

Yeah, I’m convinced.

He also made an insincere public announcement.

He’s not getting drafted into the WNBA, and he lost the senate primary, so what’s a certifiable kook to do? Announce that he’s running for the presidency.

Now the real fun begins —I will be starting my campaign for President next week. I don’t care how much money they say I need or how much ass I’m supposed to kiss. It ain’t going to happen! We win MVP of the WNBA and then head to the oval office. What I witnessed today in Minnesota is disgusting. We have not had enough yet. Minnesota nice has killed our state. We still believe in moderates, it’s embarrassing.

Now that’s a delusional lunatic!

Behold, my replacement!

I’ve only been teaching for over 40 years, so what do I know. I have to work with a team of professional biologists to hammer out a good curriculum, and I’m aware that there are a range of topics I’m not knowledgeable enough to teach — we have to work together to cover all the necessary material. I can’t even imaging having to teach material outside my narrow domain, like literature or history or advanced mathematics. I think I’d be a poor instructor in introductory chemistry, which is kind of close to biology.

So this is discouraging information.

In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.

Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

All these lay people doing homeschooling are basically just winging it. There are companies that will sell you a homeschool curriculum, so there is that, but most parents have no training in teaching. I guess that’s just a skill we don’t consider important.

Hey, I know! Let’s use an AI to do all the work! Except…LLMs don’t know anything, they’re just parrots that echo back what their users want, and so they’ll just regurgitate any old nonsense without regard for truth and accuracy. Let’s test it.

We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”

ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.

While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.

True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.

Truth doesn’t matter to an AI. Would you trust your children to it?

Struck down mid-paragraph

Yesterday, my goal was to whip my cell biology syllabus into shape, and then to reorganize my first lecture. I did not get either done, because I instead was slammed with some wicked gut disruption that struck suddenly. I had to flee home, abandoning my laptop, with my syllabus open and one paragraph in the midst of some brutal butchery. This morning I know exactly what I will find when I walk into my office: an ugly section of my syllabus with words hacked up and sentences dangling unfinished. I hope I can wrap it up quickly.

It is also possible that when I see that screen, my sympathetic nervous system will explode in revulsion. Maybe it’s not a stomach bug at all, but an esthetic rebellion. I really, really hate writing my syllabus.

The problem is that it’s been growing for decades. It’s like a cancer fueled by administrative toxins fed into it from above. Every year we get told that we have to add a section addressing X and Y and Z and on beyond zebra, that we must tell the students explicitly what is in the course, and what grading expectations we have, and who to go see if you have a headache, and the address of the registrar, and endless useful stuff. I don’t disagree that much of it is useful, but am annoyed that we have to pack every course syllabus with a full guide to life as a student. When we hand them a volume so detailed that the essential specifics of the course are buried in redundant stuff that they get in every class, it reduces the cogency of what I’m telling them.

This year, we were informed that we must include a section on the use of AI. The administration helpfully provided a whole grand template of verbiage to use for this part of the syllabus, and as usual, it’s repetitive and excessively wordy. I was trying to adapt the multiple paragraphs of the template into the required section of my syllabus, and my brain was twisting itself into peevish knots, when my gut decided to emulate my cortex.

I’m going to sit down this morning, select a bunch of useless text, hit delete, and write “DON’T USE AI.” Simple. My digestive system will thank me.

To those people, ALL of your reproductive choices are to be questioned

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced that she’s freezing her eggs, basically planning ahead to defer reproduction. Some people have feelings about this.

As predicted, a cohort of conservative critics emerged on social media to bemoan AOC’s personal choice, which challenges their prescriptive vision for American mothers: young, married and uninterested in pursuing a career.

Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is a vocal figure in the proudly antifeminist, pronatalist movement known as the “womanosphere”. She once described herself as “unapologetically pro-life” yet sounded decidedly anti-reproductive health, writing on X that Ocasio-Cortez is “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, chimed in, writing that egg freezing was “one of the reasons why fertility rates are cratering”.

“AOC turns 37 in a few weeks so if she got pregnant tomorrow it would already be a geriatric pregnancy,” added Kolvet, who has no medical credentials. “This is not female ‘liberation,’ it’s a cautionary tale.” (Factcheck: Ocasio-Cortez’s birthday is in October.)

Rightwing commentator Matt Walsh also called out the congresswoman’s age, writing: “I’ll have kids in [their] 20s by the time I turn 50. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age. Totally backwards and ridiculous.”

I say, shut the fuck up you busybodies. It is her body, her choice, you don’t have the right or the knowledge to complain about it.

This is what they want to do with everybody’s reproductive choices.

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.