The curse is hereby lifted!

Yesterday was a day of end-of-semester meetings, cleaning up pending assignments, and putting out the online final exam for the students. All grades for all of my classes are done (sans the one final, but the spreadsheet is setup so I can just plug in that last score and all the grades will be recalculated). I will be submitting grades Wednesday evening.

Tomorrow I have a couple of appointments — I’m getting an MRI of both knees, and I have a pre-op visit to clear me for surgery. The surgery itself is two weeks from today, and should be relatively quick, with a couple of days recovering at home, and several weeks of physical therapy.

So what about today? I have nothing scheduled for today. The semester is essentially over, the doctors are poking me tomorrow, but today…nada. The calendar square is blank. All obligations have ceased. I am free.

So today is all fluff. My first act is to lift a curse that has rested lightly on my house for over a decade.

Many years ago, my two sons had moved out and moved on, leaving only my daughter still living at home with us, and that caused a minor problem. You see, my wife is a female, my daughter is a female, even our cat is a female — I was outnumbered. There are certain stereotypically female habits that were therefore amplified, in particular, greater demands for hair care. I was discovering that every morning, when I got up and wanted to quickly brush away my bed head, our hairbrush had gone wandering away from the bathroom. My first solution was to buy a second hairbrush for the bathroom, easy. But then both would vanish every morning. My wife has a habit of absent-mindedly taking things and walking off with them and putting them down wherever she is when she’s done with them.

Don’t even ask about coffee cups. Before I do the dishes I have to search through the house and gather up all the coffee cups. Yesterday I found ten of them scattered haphazardly about, most of them half full of whatever Mary was drinking out of them.

I knew I was on a rising exponential curve with the hairbrush thing, so rather than buying a third, a fourth, an eleventh, etc., and filling the whole house with hairbrushes, I came up with a simpler solution. I used a sharpie to draw a skull and crossbones on one, along with a short declaration that this was a cursed hairbrush that must never be removed from the bathroom, or a dire but unspecified fate will befall the thief.

It worked!

That’s what magic and curses are all about — creating reminders about what behaviors should be followed, shaping customs, flagging what is prohibited and what is allowed. They work even if there is no power behind them.

Well, today I declare the curse is lifted. My daughter has moved on, and I’m still outnumbered by the females in the house, but the cat doesn’t use the hairbrush anyway. The sharpie marks have faded, and the bristles in the hairbrush have been falling out, so the animus haunting the brush has disappeared. Even curses can die.

Although…maybe I should transfer it to some coffee cups.

There’s no penalty to enabling pedophiles, I guess

My first surprise on reading this article about Bard College was learning that they’d had the same president for 51 years. That’s astonishing to me — I’ve been at one university for a quarter century, and I’ve seen a half dozen chancellors come and go. I am accustomed to the transient nature of administrators, and think it’s disturbing that one person would have control of a university for that long. Bard College is located near New York, though, and while about the same size as UMM, it is vastly more wealthy, owning lots of valuable property, with valuable connections. I’m sure it was profitable to be president there.

But no more! The president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, is stepping down. You may not be surprised by the reason: he was a good buddy with Jeffrey Epstein.

WilmerHale’s report, released on Friday, detailed Botstein’s extensive in-person contacts with Epstein, including “approximately 25 visits to Epstein’s townhouse, a two-day visit to Epstein’s Little St. James Island and a flight to the island with one such woman (along with Leon Black’s family), two visits by Epstein to Bard and to various concerts and recitals accompanied by multiple women who have since been identified as victims of Epstein, and multiple requests that President Botstein help such women — in the form of invitations to concerts and rehearsals, visits with the women and their parents, advice on their musical careers, etc.”

The Times Union has previously reported on Epstein’s visits to Bard’s campus in Annandale-on-Hudson as well as Epstein’s efforts to leverage his relationship with Botstein to lure women, including musicians, into his orbit, whom Epstein later victimized.

Holy crap. What a horror story — I’m sure Botstein is now persona non grata on campus and the college is rushing to repair the reputational damage of being led by an enabler of pedophiles. What parent would want to send their child to a college with such a parasite roaming the campus?

But no. Botstein is going to be stinking up the place for a good long while.

He will retire from the presidency but said he would remain as a faculty member, teacher and musician. He also said he will continue to operate the Bard Music Festival, SummerScape, as well as the Bard Conservatory, and will live on campus at Finberg House.

I don’t understand how they wouldn’t simply evict the guy out of hand. So this old creep is going to be hanging about with students and alumni and faculty until he drops dead?

It’s amazing how no one affiliated with Epstein has suffered any real consequences, other than Ghislane Maxwell, who recently got transferred to a cushier prison and has politicians considering granting clemency. I’ve never supported a rich pedophile, which, in hindsight, is looking like a poor career decision.

I’ve been shirking today

Yesterday, I got a text from Caliber Works Watch Repair, informing me that my great-grandfather’s pocket watch was ready to go after 18 months. The 18 months was fine — it’s an old family heirloom, it’s not as if I needed it right away, since it was just going to be displayed on a shelf. This watch was made in 1908, my great-grandfather the dairy farmer owned it as his work timepiece, it got passed on and mostly neglected. I did wear it on my wedding day, but then my grandparents took it back and stashed in a drawer. After they died, it bumbled about in various storage containers, neglected and ignored, and was damaged in major ways: the watch crystal was smashed, one of the hands was broken off, it had run down and was allowed to freeze up for decades. I got it a few years ago.

I wound it up and put it to my ear, and it worked! So I took it in to be restored and repaired. I was supposed to be grading papers today, but instead I drove all the way into Minneapolis and back — a 6 hour round trip — and got the watch back. It’s beautiful. I’m wondering now whether I should get rid of the iPhone and carry this robust, elegant piece of machinery instead. It wouldn’t ring and take calls, but that might be a positive advantage.

And here it is without my noise:

Now I better get to work on all those papers.

This post will probably make the infestation worse

A couple of us faculty at UMM are shopping for microscopes — we need to replace a dozen of the tired old student stereoscopes with snazzier models. I’ve sent out several inquiries by email to various vendors, but I left out an important requirement: now I want a car microscope, to keep up with all the YUSsies.

I’ve got a couple of quotes, but you know what else I’ve got? A flood of ads for microscopes. Every web page I visit that has ads is now a parade of microscopes marching down the page. I’m not complaining, it’s better than the “one weird trick” ads and the ads for useless supplements.

I have to roll my eyes when a creationist says information!

You can tell when you’ve encountered some gullible twit of a creationist who has swallowed the Discovery Institute line whole. Whenever they recite Stephen Meyer’s favorite line, that only intelligence can create information, you know you’re debating a fool.

It’s simply not true. Anyone who has studied genetics knows there are many natural processes that generate information, making the claim obviously false. It’s good to have Dr Dan present a short sweet refutation.

I’ve confronted people with this kind of explanation many times in the past. Just search PubMed for “random nucleotide sequences” (or amino acid sequences) and it’ll come back with page after page of articles on the subject — they’re fairly common tools for exploring the functional space. Notice that the first one on this list is from 1983.

The standard response I’ve gotten from creationists is that’s not complex information, and if you ask them to define “complex” they will waffle around, and eventually declare something about complex specified information, which just means information that was defined by a prior source, by which they mean “God”, because they sure as heck don’t have a primordial volume that dictates the modern sequences.

It’s really just a rabbit hole that they can lead you into. They don’t even have a grasp on the meaning of “information” — it just sounds sciencey to their ears.

Last gasp of Spring 2026

Today is my last class day — I have a 3 hour lab ahead of me. Only it’s not a “lab”, I’m opening up that time for lab report review, so I’m going to be sitting and reading drafts of their report and making suggestions. They’re due tomorrow, so that’s when I’ll be going the real grading.

Then I put together an online exam that they have to take at home. Today is the last day I have to talk with students, which isn’t great. But freedom until August is appealing, even if using it to get surgery isn’t.

Now…unto the breach!

NO KINGS.

This photo is disgusting. Trump is no king, even if he has royal delusions.

I thought that was bad, but then I read the speech Trump gave to welcome King Charles. It’s a lot of florid nonsense written by a very bad speechwriter.

Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea. For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride, and that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride.

The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.

Notice the white nationalist theme; America is a nation of British, Anglo-Saxon people, and that’s what makes us great. Never mind all those other people who built the country, it was English destiny that forged this nation. Never mind the principles of representative democracy.

Yuck.

Anyone want to bet that Stephen Miller was the author? Total Nazi shit.

It’s knee day

I’m going in to the local hospital this morning to plan my ambulatory future. I’m getting some X-rays of my knees done, and meeting with an orthopedic surgeon to, I hope, schedule arthropedic surgery to patch up a torn meniscus. This has been pending for over a year — a long, miserable year of aching knees — but my initial treatment was canceled when I had a broken blood vessel in my eye. Clearly, it was too dangerous to operate on my knee!

So, fingers crossed. I really want this surgery to restore my mobility, all of my summer plans hinge on it. This doctor seems to be pretty quick to put off work on the slightest pretext, though, so I don’t have a tremendous amount of confidence that I’m going to be restored soon. I’ll know in a few hours.

It was a successful meeting: I am scheduled for knee surgery on the 16th of May. Hip hip hooray! Or should that be knee knee hooray?

Capitalism has lost the plot

Stephanie Stirling has been right all along. She’s always insisted that video game company CEOs were heartless, greedy monsters, and now one of them has stepped forward go confirm their well-deserved reputation. The CEO of a company called Ustwo, Maria Sayans, made a speech declaring what she thinks is the future of her business.

We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.

There’s the capitalist ideal: the company is an empty shell that houses CEOs who get extravagant salaries, but no employees. The actual work, the output the company produces, is to be farmed out to external contractors on the cheap. A game, the purported purpose and product of this company, is to be produced by an executive with an MBA who has no artistic talent, no creative talent, and definitely no ability to code.

Instead of getting rid of the employees, how about firing all the CEOs?