AI poisons everything

Here we go again. Another paper, this time in Radiology Case Reports, got published while including obvious AI-generated text. I haven’t read the paper, since it’s been pulled, but it’s easy to see where it went wrong.

It begins:

In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.

That is enraging. The author of this paper is churning them out so heedlessly that they provide no time or care to the point they’ve given up writing and now have given up reading their own work. Back in the day when I was publishing with coauthors, we were meticulous to the point of tedium in proofreading — we’d have long sessions where we’d read alternate sentences of the paper to each other to catch any typos and review the content. Ever since I’ve assumed that most authors follow some variation of that procedure. I was wrong.

If I knew an author was this sloppy and lazy in their work, I wouldn’t trust anything they ever wrote. How can you make all the thought and effort you put into the science, and then just hand off the communication of that science to an unthinking machine? It suggests to me that as little thought was put into the research as in the writing.

No wonder there is such a glut of scientific literature.

I could have told her that would never work

One of the great questions of the Internet Age is, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” It has never been satisfactorily resolved, but Talia Levin boldly submitted the question to a battery of academics. You know what the result had to be, but you might as well read it just to witness the chaos for yourself.

The one answer I liked was from Mark Crimmins, a professor of philosophy at Stanford.

Any well-defended answer to that would take many pages and encompass so many (great, interesting) issues about language. Still, I’d like to offer something to your reader. If you think what counts as a “sandwich” is unclear or somewhat arbitrary, then you had better examine in that light whatever principles you take to be important about sandwiches. Similarly for “baby,” “woman,” “conscious,” “intelligent.” Are you sure that the (perhaps unclear) applicability of these ordinary-language terms marks what is crucial to the distinctions carved by your prized principles?

Categorical mushiness, that’s what I like. All the definitions are fine, the only mistake you can make is expecting simplicity from complexity.

44, shhhhh

Today is my 44th anniversary, but I’m not making a big noise about it. You never know, I worry that I might mention the big number, and she’ll look at me with dawning awareness and say, “Well, that’s about enough of that then. Time for me to be moving on!”

I figure if I let her situation slowly ease in, then maybe at some time I’ll mention the years, and she’ll be resigned to it and say, “Might as well stay then, if I’ve been here that long.” Maybe if I hang on to the big 5-O I’ll be safe. You gotta go slow, you don’t want to startle them, or they might just dart away.

But what about Free Speech?

You better not mention Hans Kristian Graebener on Twitter — Elon Musk doesn’t like it when you expose one of his favorite Nazis.

Twitter is nuking every single post that mentions the name Hans Kristian Graebener, even in quotes. Everyone that posts it is getting hit. I’ve never seen sitewide censorship like this done specifically on behalf of a neo nazi.

Gosh. He’ll suspend his support for free speech to help conceal a notorious creep? Maybe his support isn’t that deep.

Have they tried calling him Gräbener? It might sneak past some of the automated blocking.

Ignorance and hate go well together

In May of 1933, Nazis stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and walked off with cartloads of books from their library, which they then burned, publicly. This is one of the most famous photographs of the pre-war period, illustrating their process for purging “Jewish” literature from Germany.

On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.

A book publisher named Rubin Mass afterwards found a few scorched pages that survived the fire, and preserved them to remember the criminality of the right-wing mob.

They were from Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and a scholar, so of course he was hated by Nazis. Most people who know anything about the rise of Hitler’s regime know this — it’s common knowledge that the Nazis regarded anything to do with deviations from a Christian heterosexual norm as degenerate. You have to be soaking in the anti-intellectual, ahistorical circle-jerk of right-wing apologetics to be totally unaware of these facts.

Cue JK Rowling.

J.K. Rowling is once again making ignorant and anti-trans comments online. On Wednesday, the Harry Potter author’s name began trending on X thanks to an ill-advised post in which she denied the claim that Nazis burned “books on trans healthcare and research.”

“I just… how?” Rowling wrote above a screenshot of a nameless user’s post. “How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?””

I wish the murder of six million Jews, gays, transexuals, Romany, and political opponents had been nothing but a “fever dream,” but it wasn’t. It was a horrible reality that now a famous author of children’s fantasy books would like to bring back.

I’m ashamed to say that I contributed to her coffers years ago, by buying several of her books for my kids. That was before she grew the invisible toothbrush mustache and started openly courting fascists, though. At least I never paid to see any of those Harry Potter movies, and never will.

That’s no Franken-sheep

What do you think happened in a story with this headline, “Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts”? Oooh, Franken-Sheep and animal parts…were they importing chopped up bits of animal corpses and stitching them together to make monster sheep? The story continues:

An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.

The “animal parts” are whole, intact embryos of Marco Polo sheep, a very large species, and then raising them to adulthood. He was basically smuggling in embryonic sheep, nothing particularly radical scientifically.

Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the U.S., he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.

“Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.

Then they collected semen from the adult sheep, and crossed them to domestic sheep, again, not at all radical scientifically. Somebody tried to jazz up the story with talk of animal parts and Franken-sheep, when it’s really a story about illegally importing an endangered species from its native range, and hybridizing them to produce a stock for profit. The story is bad enough without stuffing it full of misleading pseudoscience.

At least the guy behind the scheme got his comeuppance.

Schubart pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, and conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to acquire, transport or sell wildlife in contravention of federal law.

“This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” assistant Attorney General Todd Kim from the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a press release.

“In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,” Kim continued.

Yeah, and that’s the extra ugly twist here. They weren’t doing this to help the species — they were raising great big sheep on ranches so big game hunters could pay big money to shoot a large animal. On a farm. You know, real sportsman-like.

Hans Kristian Graebener no longer has to hide in the shadows

He must be so relieved to have been doxxed — now he can be his true self in public. He can go speak at conferences for his people, appear on television in documentaries, proudly march in parades.

Graebener is the creator of Stonetoss, the webcomic that tries to find the “cute” in “nazi”, while failing to notice that those two words share no letters in common. He does all these short “comics” with the same frequent punchlines: trans people end up killing themselves, gay people end up bathing in feces, Jews are behind everything and are scheming to sacrifice Xian babies. When they aren’t obvious, they’re so loaded with impenetrable bizarre references to neo-Nazi shit they’re incomprehensible, but racists and haters and Nazis love them anyway. You can even buy an adorable little plush toy of the main character. He’s also been peddling NFTs, still, endlessly trying to grift his way to riches and glory, and now he can do it in his own charmingly German name.

Graebener is an IT guy working (so far!) in Spring, Texas. He’s single, girls! He’s been known to desperately advertise his availability, but doesn’t seem to have landed a long-term relationship. I can’t imagine what a pleasant person he must be in person.

No, really, I can’t imagine it.

I can imagine that he’s the kind of guy who has a porn addiction. Too bad he lives in Texas, now that PornHub has blocked the whole state.

He’ll be OK, though. I’m sure he’ll have the support of Elon Musk, a guy who loves to promote racism.

Garrison also talks to Dr. Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, who points out that because this racism is seemingly backed by scientific fact, people often lack the language to call out its problematic nature.

“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.’”

Musk can do the hundred charts, while Graebener brings the ugly.

Time to find out if all my parts still work!

Good morning! I am going to the doctor today! It’s time for my yearly physical exam!

Just a suggestion: there are things you should not see or read before a doctor’s visit, like John Oliver’s report on the ineffectiveness of state medical boards and how incompetent doctors are hopping from state to state to butcher patients.

It’s OK! It’s just a physical! How much harm could a doctor do in a routine examination?

Then I read Chuck Wendig’s account of an irritating examination by his doctor. Fortunately, I can say that my doctor is nothing like his callous, bumbling doctor. Although I have to admit, this part rang true:

So, he then asks, and once again, please wait for it, wait for it —

“What medications are you taking?” And then, you know, have I had surgery, who in my family is alive and how did the dead ones die.

At this point I’m fairly convinced that I’m being punked, like this is some kind of joke, right? They all tell me, ha ha, no masks, also, please give us the same information you just gave to the last three people. Is anybody writing this down? Two of the people seem to be tapping it into a fucking iPad, but at this point I’m pretty sure they’re just playing Wordle. There is literally no continuity of information. I sigh, and I tell him the information AGAIN.

Now that is familiar. I got a long questionnaire in the mail a few weeks ago, and I dutifully filled it out to bring to the clinic today. Then they sent me an email, telling me to fill out an online survey, which was just as long and mostly the same questions, with a few little differences. I filled that out, too. I expect that today when I get there a nurse will sit down with a clipboard and go through the same questions one by one by one, and I’ll sit there in exposed in my gown, nodding.

But that’s just the medical bureaucracy, which we all hate anyway. My doctor is someone I’ve known for many years now, she’ll be helpful and fine, and probably won’t stab me. I think!

I’m back! The good news: blood pressure is perfect, cholesterol & triglycerides perfect, no problems detected in any of my blood work. I guess I’ll have to cancel all my funeral plans.

Unfortunately, there’s always something to bring me down. I’ve been scheduled for a colonoscopy in August.

Oh, also, all those forms I filled out? The nurse immediately ripped out a whole page of densely packed questions and triumphantly threw it in the trash. I didn’t need to fill that out! How silly of me.

You know, alcohol is not good for children and other growing things

A few weeks ago, I had an absolutely delicious stout at a brew pub in Alexandria. I’m going to have to remember it, because it may have been the last time I let alcohol pass these lips. Why? Because I’m slowly turning into one of those snooty teetotalers who tut-tut over every tiny sin. It started with vegetarianism, now it’s giving up alcohol, where will it end? Refusing caffeine, turning down the enticements of naked women, refusing to dance? The bluenose in me is emerging as I get older. I shall become a withered, juiceless old Puritan with no joy left in me.

It didn’t help that last week I was lecturing on alcohol teratogenesis in my eco devo course, and it was reminding me of what a pernicious, sneaky molecule it is. I’ve known a lot of this stuff for years, but there’s a kind of blindness brought on by familiarity that led me to dismiss many of the problems. You know the phenomenon: “it won’t affect me, I only drink in moderation” and other excuses. Yeah, no. There are known mechanisms for how alcohol affects you, besides the obvious ones of inebriation.

  1. It induces cell death.
  2. It affects neural crest cell migration.
  3. It downregulates sonic hedgehog, essential for midline differentiation.
  4. It downregulates Sox5 and Ngn1, genes responsible for neuron growth and maturation.
  5. It weakens L1-modulated cell adhesion.

I already knew all about those first four — I’ve done experiments in zebrafish like these done in mice.

Take a normal, healthy embryo like the one in A, expose it to alcohol, and stain the brain for cell death with any of a number of indicator dyes, like Nile Blue sulfate in this example B (I’ve used acridine orange, it works the same way). That brain is speckled with dead cells, killed by alcohol. If you do it just right, you can also see selective cell death in neural crest cell populations, so you’re specifically killing cells involved in the formation of the face and the neurons that innervate it. In C, you can see the rescuing effects of superoxide dismutase, a free radical scavenger, and that tells you that one of the mechanisms behind the cell death is the cell-killing consequences of free radicals. I could get a similar reduction in the effects with megadoses of vitamin C, but that doesn’t mean a big glass of orange juice will save you from your whisky bender.

I was routinely generating one-eyed jawless fish, a consequence of the double-whammy of knocking out sonic hedgehog and cell death in the cells that make branchial arches.

You can wave away these results by pointing out those huge concentrations of alcohol we use to get those observable effects, but we only do that because we don’t have the proper sensitivity to detect subtle variations in the faces of mice or fish. So we crank up the dosage to get a big, undeniable effect.

I only just learned about the L1 effects, and that’s a case where we have a sensitive assay for alcohol’s effects. L1 is a cell surface adhesion molecule — it helps appropriate populations of cells stick together in the nervous system. It also facilitates neurite growth. It’s good for happy growing brains.

It also makes for a relatively easy and quantitative assay. Put neuronal progenitors that express L1 in a dish, and they clump together, as they should in normal development. Add a little alcohol to the medium, and they become less sticky, and the clumps disperse.

What’s troubling about this is the dosage. Adhesion is significantly reduced at concentration of 7mM, which is what the human blood alcohol level reaches after a single drink. The fetal brain may not be forming as robustly when Mom does a little social drinking that doesn’t leave her impaired at all, not even a slight buzz.

Maybe you console yourself by telling yourself a little bit does no harm, your liver soaks up most of the damage (and livers are self-repairing!), that it’s only binge drinkers who have to worry about fetal alcohol syndrome, etc., etc., etc. We have lots of excuses handy. Humans are actually surprisingly sensitive to environmental insults, we have mechanisms to compensate, but there’s no denying that we’re modifying our biochemistry and physiology in subtle ways by exposure to simple molecules.

Now maybe you also tell yourself that you’re a grown-up, I’m talking about fetal tissues, and you also don’t intend to get pregnant in the near future or ever. I’m also a great big fully adult person who is definitely not ever going to get pregnant, but development is a life-long process, and we’re all fragile creatures who nonetheless soak up all kinds of interesting and dangerous chemicals during our existence. We know alcohol will kill adult brain cells, but what else does it do? Do you want to be a guinea pig? I think that, as I age, I am becoming increasingly aware of all the bad stuff I did to myself in my heedless youth, and am starting to think that maybe I need to be a little more careful, belatedly.

Oh, you want some reassuring information? Next week we’re discussing endocrine disruptors in my class — DDT, DES, BPA, PCB, etc. — all these wonderful products of plastics and petrochemical technology. You’re soaking in them right now. They never go away. How’s your sperm count looking? Any weird glandular dysplasias? Ethanol looks pretty good compared to chlorinated and brominated biphenyls.