I may have just turned 68, but I still have a little dignity

I’m not wearing one of these things, or obsessing over the hundred pills I choose to swallow every night, or comparing myself to my sons. I’m not Bryan Johnson, the current joke of a man aging poorly.

According to my calculations, it ain’t worth it. But he also has the penis of a 22-year-old.

He should give it back. To be clear, he has the penile health of someone 25 years younger.

How would you even measure that? By the number, duration and quality of one’s night-time erections.

And how would you even measure that? With an erectile tracker – you wear it to bed and it sends the data to your phone.

So your phone tells you your penile age? After a fashion, yes.

Where can you get one of these devices? Asking for a friend. You can buy them online for £150, but the company that makes them is oversubscribed, so there’s currently a seven-to-eight-week waiting list.

If anyone wants to buy me a present, don’t get me an erection tracker.

An open letter to all science-fiction/fantasy authors

This morning, I strolled down to the coffeeshop to relax and read a book by an author I’ve always enjoyed (it’s Spring Break, I get to do that!) I started on this book I’d checked out from the library, and it was…a novel about a multiverse.

I hate multiverse stories. All of them. I want you all to stop writing these lazy, incoherent, chaotic exercises in the dismissal of any logical causality.

It’s not that I have any say in the matter, you can go ahead and write whatever you want, but jesus, this crutch to remove any element of rational causality, to allow you to just magically allow anything to happen, leaves me cold. And annoyed. And disappointed. I don’t get that many mornings where I can just sit down with a book and a cup of coffee and unwind.

Look, I don’t expect rigid realism. I’ll read a book about a supernatural killer clown haunting the sewers, or about an interstellar diplomatic mission, and it’s fine. I can suspend disbelief, no problem, as long as I can see consequences playing out and conflicts resolved within the frame of the premises. When suddenly the author has carte blanche to rewind all events and schlep in a character from an “alternate universe” to turn the plot around and go off in crazy directions, I don’t care anymore.

It’s also that they never present the implications appropriately — it’s always about a small handful of people in a crisis, and they invoke A WHOLE COMPLETE VAST ALTERNATE UNIVERSE to save Uncle Billy from a couple of monsters. I hate it. Spare me. Try to find a small flyswatter in your plot to do what needs to be done, rather than relying on a cosmic intergalactic nuke to rescue your little corner of a story.

I’m not saying what book ruined my morning, because usually this author is reliably entertaining.

A science rally!

I was in St. Paul, or transiting to and from St. Paul, all day yesterday for the grand #StandUpForScience rally. As you might expect for an event organized by science nerds, it was flawlessly executed: it started exactly at 3pm, had about 10 speakers, and finished precisely at 5pm. The speakers were all brief and to the point. We had several state legislators talk about the importance of science education and the contributions of science to our state’s economy, and several people with direct experience of the impact of Trump’s chaos — one young woman had just finished a post-doc and got a job with a state agency (the forest service, I think) the week after the election, and walked into a demoralized office where no one knew what was going to happen to them. She found out: she was fired 3 weeks after starting, with 2 hours notice.

Some people talked about social and economic justice, in particular, the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC), which I knew nothing about until yesterday. It’s a big incinerator which converts trash to energy, which is nice, but somehow it got located to the center of a district filled with low-income and minority residents. Funny how that happens.

Science and DEI are intertwined — so many first generation scientists were reliant on DEI initiatives to get their careers started. One speaker suggested a good question to ask critics of DEI: What, specifically, are they opposed to? Is it diversity, do they dislike people of color working in science and engineering? Is it equity, the idea of equal pay for equal work, do they think brown people should get less support? Or is it inclusion, the idea that minorities should be able to work shoulder to shoulder with existing, dominant groups? There’s no good answer to those kinds of questions, and they’re all just hiding behind an acronym, afraid to spell out what they actually want.

Another theme of speakers and participants was the raging inequality in this country. Mention the word “corporations” and you heard a chorus of “boos”. A lot of the signs people were waving targeted the wealthy and unfair tax laws, that the Trump regime was robbing science to make the rich richer. Everyone in this crowd hated billionaires in general and Elon Musk in particular. That guy is so desperate for attention and respect and popularity, and he has made himself the #1 enemy and object of contempt by scientists & engineers & teachers & health experts. Chalk that up to yet another tremendous failure by Musk the Incompetent.

It seems the greed of the wealthy in this country has inspired a lot of people to look favorably on communism and wealth redistribution and the social safety net and mutual aid. That’s going to backfire spectacularly on the upper class. This event sounded like a communist rally at times, good for them.

Also, I got to meet many fellow angry supporters of science, including commenter foolishleader who does have a spectacular octopus hat.

I’m looking forward to more Stand Up for Science events!

Some conservatives might be persuadable

Good news from Montana: the legislature was flooded with anti-trans laws, but they’ve all been defeated. They failed because a few eloquent trans advocates stood up and persuaded 29 Republicans to change course. Here’s one of the speeches, this one by Zooey Zephyr, with support by a Republican representative:

“Here I am again to rise on another bill targeting the LGBTQ+ community,” she said, exasperated. “At its very core, drag is art. It is very beautiful art. It has a deep history in this country, and it is important to my community. You know, if you are a woman in this body wearing a suit today, you are in some way challenging gender norms that existed long ago… There were three-article-of-clothing laws 50 years ago that said if you wore three articles of clothing that were indicative of the opposite gender, they could stop you, arrest you… it was those laws that led to the police raiding an LGBTQ+ bar that led to the Stonewall riots, one of the most important civil rights moments in my community’s history,” she began.

“When the sponsor closed on this bill, he said, this bill is needed… and I quote his words… ‘because transgenderism is a fetish based on crossdressing.’ And I am here to stand before the body and say that my life is not a fetish. My existence is not a fetish. I was proud within a month ago to have my son up in the gallery here. Many of you on the other side met him. When I go to walk him to school, that’s not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This is what these bills are trying to come after… not obscene shows in front of children, we have the Miller test for that, we have laws for that. This is a way to target the trans community, and that is in my opinion, and in the speaker’s own words.”

Then something even more remarkable happened: A Republican, Representative Sherry Essman, rose to defend Rep. Zephyr and chastised the bill’s sponsor. “I’m speaking as a parent and a grandmother. And I’m very emotional because I know the representative in seat 20 is also a parent. No matter what you think of that, she is doing her best to raise a child. I did my best to raise my children as I saw fit, and I’m taking it for granted that my children are going to raise my grandchildren as they see fit,” she began.

“Everybody in here talks about how important parental rights are. I want to tell you, in addition to parental rights, parental responsibility is also important. And if you can’t trust a decent parent to decide where and when their kids should see what, then we have a bigger problem,” she turned to parental rights and spoke about how people who claim those rights should vote against the bill.

And then, she closed by chastising the bill’s sponsor for bringing the bill, “Trust the parents to do what’s right, and stop these crazy bills that are a waste of time. They’re a waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this house and having to even talk about this.”

There’s more at the link. I also appreciate this criticism of weak Democrats.

At a time when anti-trans bills are sailing through red-state legislatures, many are left wondering how they can be stopped. Some Democrats, like Gavin Newsom, have chosen appeasement—standing alongside anti-trans hate leaders like Charlie Kirk instead of standing up for transgender people. But Representatives Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell offer a different path. As transgender lawmakers in a Republican-dominated government, they have shown that representation, relationships, and the power of speaking truth in hostile spaces can move hearts and minds. Their success is a reminder that even in the most challenging environments, refusing to back down can make a difference.

Another chickenshit Democrat

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who also has aspirations to the presidency, has destroyed any chance he has of achieving that higher office, by creating a podcast.

The first guest on that podcast? Charlie Kirk. The unqualified white nationalist backed by far-right millionaires.

Aww hell no. I’m never going to support a candidate who gives air to evil lunatics like that.

Even worse…what did they talk about? They found common ground in their shared hatred of transgender athletes. It’s insane. Transgender kids participating in sports is a good thing that should not be of concern, and only bigots are furious at trans boys and girls. Especially since…

Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports.

It shouldn’t matter whether there are 5 or 5 million — denying rights to any group of people is wrong. Newsom is just pandering to the perception that Americans all hate trans people.

But we’ve already got wooly mice

Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

There are a few problems with those claims.

  • We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:

    Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

  • The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.

  • They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.

So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.

EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.

They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.

As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.