No wonder I didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year

I thought maybe it had gotten lost in the mail, but no, that wasn’t it: the organizers of this science-fiction award had apparently gone nuts, disqualifying authors for stupid reasons. Also it probably helped that I didn’t write a science fiction novel last year, but that seems to have been a lesser problem than being at all critical of the Chinese government, or being supportive of gay people. The organizers were a combination of being incompetent, being bigoted, and trying to pander to an oppressive regime.

When the Hugos took place in Chengdu last October, it wasn’t immediately clear that the something was amiss. Shit hit the fan months later, when the awards committee finally released its long-awaited nominating statistics. The volunteer body typically releases the numbers the same evening as the ceremony, or within days of the event, but for this year, the stats didn’t arrive until 91 days after the event, per Esquire. Finally released on January 20, 2024, the reports showed that Kuang’s Babel, an episode of Gaiman’s The Sandman, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer all received more than enough preliminary votes to be finalists for awards, yet an asterisk denoted each of their works as “ineligible” for award consideration.

McCarty antagonized critics in multiple Facebook comments that day amid a fan uproar over the artists’ apparent disqualification. He first shared last year’s nominating statistics to the public and derisively attempted to shield the Hugos from criticism. “Are you slow?” he responded to a comment asking him why certain works were deemed ineligible based on the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution. “Clearly you can’t understand plain English in our constitution,” he wrote to another, per Esquire.

Speculation that the Chinese government played a role in censoring the votes grew. Comic-book writer Gaiman has previously voiced criticisms of the government for incarcerating writers. Both Kuang and Zhao were born in China and now live in the West, and their books tackle social issues in allegorical fantasy worlds. However, McCarty denied the notion in a Facebook post in the days following the release of the nominating-statistics release. “Nobody has ordered me to do anything …” he wrote per the Guardian on January 24. “There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”

After reading much of this stuff, I don’t think anybody should believe anything this Dave McCarty says — he’s a liar and all-around nasty person.

There are lots of specific examples and quotes from the organizers’ internal emails on BlueSky. The arrogance of these guys was appalling.

These Hugo dossiers are disgusting.
“Author openly describes themselves as queer, nonbibary, trans… I don’t know how that will play in China (I suspect less than well)”
They wrote that in writing.
…
The gaslighting the Hugos organizers did, telling everyone they were stupid for not getting that the works were i eligible due to “the rules” and it turns out the authors criticized a human right violation once, or ate Tibetan food, or said a Taiwanese Batman hotel looked cool.

Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford wrote a detailed dissection of the whole mess. Not recommended unless you enjoy lengthy discussions of bad behavior.

So what will they do to untangle this clusterfuck? I’d recommend firing everyone involved and burning their precious constitution to the ground, and rewrite the whole thing. I have no connection to any of it, so ignore me, let’s see what they’re actually doing.

Worldcon Intellectual Property, the nonprofit that runs the World Science Fiction Society, announced resignations in the immediate aftermath to the scandal on January 30, Publishers Weekly reported. Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee resigned from their respective positions, with the former censured for his public Facebook comments. Chengdu Worldcon administration member Ben Yalow, who co-chaired the 2023 event and was set to work on this year’s event in Glasgow, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow staff page. He and his fellow co-chair Chen Shi were censured for their actions.

“I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress,” the current chair of Glasgow 2024, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, said in a statement on February 14. She added that the committee would be taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the awards.” While the upcoming Worldcon has apologized for the failings of the previous year’s convention, the 2023 iteration of the event has not directly apologized for its handling of the awards. Vulture reached out to the Hugos for comment.

Maybe also never hold the event in a country with an ugly repressive government, too? (Never again in the US if Trump gets elected…maybe not even if he isn’t.) I hope this is all fixed by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.

Let’s all get disappointed in humanity

I thought everyone knew by now that the whole “bumfight” concept was repugnant and deplorable, but it seems to have gotten some new life from technology. A few sick people are harassing unhoused people with drones. See, bullying in total safety! There’s an amazing amount of cowardice behind this behavior.

The TikTok account was called “BumsnDrones,” and its previous name was “Bad2TheDrone.” Similar accounts are active on YouTube and Instagram under the same name, and a new account with the “BumsnDrones” name was active on TikTok as of Friday evening.

…

In two separate videos, the drone hovers above individuals for an unspecified period of time and distance and appears to provoke them by flying up and down. Other videos show individuals throwing projectiles at the unmanned aircraft system, such as rocks, water bottles and sticks.

“It’s really disappointing to see the way this individual is harassing and bullying people experiencing homelessness,” said Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “It was difficult to watch people put in humiliating and exposed positions.”

In nearly all of the videos posted on each channel, music plays in the background, seemingly for comedic effect. Many of the individuals filmed in the videos attempt to flee the vicinity of the drone or seem agitated by its presence.

Multiple videos appear to show the operator of the drone mocking or taunting the individuals by flying close to them before bolting in another direction either vertically or horizontally when the individuals reach for it.

The drone bullies are calling these “pranks”. I’m getting tired of that word — “prank” seems to be a synonym for cruelty.

Some of these accounts have been taken down, but as the quote above mentions, they just pop up again with a new synonym. It was easy to find lots that are still active — here’s one called “abnormal humans”. I don’t think the creators realize how self-referential that name is.

One such video had 59,000 views and 226 comments, and the comments were as vile as the video. No, I’m not linking to it. Go google your own bullies!

Fight!

Please god, SHAVE

Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

What happens when you farm out your scientific illustrations to an AI?

Things get psychedelic. These are actual illustrations from a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway. They had Midjourney do the illustrations, and they are spectacular! And confusing and uninformative.

Regulation of biological properties of spermatogonial stem cells by JAK/STAT signaling pathway. (A) The relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell proliferation; (B) Relationship between the JAK/STAT signaling pathway and the microenvironment of spermatogonial stem cells; (C) Relationship between the JAK/STAT pathway and spermatogonial stem cell tissue differentiation; (D) Relationship between JAK/STAT pathway and homing migration of spermatogonial stem cells; (E) The JAK/STAT pathway and immune regulation in spermatogonial stem cells.

Look at the labels! AIs are terrible at reproducing text in images, and these make no sense…and most of the diagrams are random piles of throbbing circles. What do they mean? I don’t know.

But here’s my very favorite image. What have they done to that poor rat?

Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes.

The labels…they do nothing! The text of the paper makes sense and is a reasonable discussion of the role of the JAK/STAT pathway in spermatogonial differentiation, but then your eyes wander over to those bizarre illustrations and you get totally discombobulated.

I should print that last picture out in color, and place copies at floor level around my house as a rodent repellent. Except my cat already has a problem with frequent puking.

New depths in pseudoscience

Creationists have been playing a game for about 60 years. Their claims can’t get published in legitimate scientific journals, so they have created their very own boutique journals that mimic the real things: Answers in Genesis has the Answers Research Journal, which, surprisingly, always comes up with the same answer. The Discovery Institute has Bio-Complexity. The oldest of the bunch is Creation Research Society Quarterly, which proudly announces that it is Peer-reviewed by degreed scientists…with the caveat that in order to be involved in the journal at all, you must be a Christian who subscribes to their statement of belief.

It doesn’t need to be pointed out that real scientists don’t publish in any of those ‘journals’, only kooks who are in the business of rationalizing their superstitions.

But there’s one thing that they haven’t done, as far as I know, and that is creating their own Institutional Review Board to legitimize experiments. One good reason is that they don’t do experiments, especially not experiments on animals or people, so they don’t have to bother. You know who does have to pretend to do experiments? Anti-vaxxers.

They’ve gone and done it. They already have their own fake journals, but now they’ve gone and created a fake IRB so they can rubber-stamp horrible experiments with ridiculous reagents on living people. Orac has the low-down.

Recently, a longtime reader made me aware of a recent podcast episode in which an antivaxxer about whom I’ve written a number of posts over the years, James Lyons-Weiler, revealed a “surprise” announcement a little over halfway through the podcast that his antivax “research” organization, the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), is planning on forming his own institutional review board (IRB).

Lyons-Weiler has a fake organization and a fake journal, so why not go all the way and create a fake IRB to approve fake experiments?

IRBs are important for maintaining ethical standards and getting expert review of experimental protocols — setting up a fake IRB is a declaration that you want to work around those requirements. Orac has a specific idea of what Lyons-Weiler wants to do — not actual research of his own, but an opportunity to data mine other studies.

In the interview, Lyons-Weiler inadvertently reveals what is likely to be the true impetus and purpose for his IRB when he points out that states are refusing to release public health data, particularly record-level data, to researchers because they don’t have an IRB-approved protocol. My first thought was: How much do you want to bet that the “researchers” to which Lyons-Weiler refers are antivax “researchers” who want to data mine state public health databases in order to seek “findings” that attribute horrific harms to vaccines, particularly COVID-19 vaccines? In other words, how much do you want to bet that Lyons-Weiler’s IRB will exist to rubber-stamp antivax human subjects research protocols, so that antivax researchers can get their hands on that sweet, sweet state record-level public health data on vaccines?

I should confess that for many years I avoided having to get IRB approval, despite working on vertebrate animals, because there was a loophole that allowed experimentation on anamniote embryos — when you’ve got an animal that spews out hundreds of eggs per day, most of which will be cannibalized if they aren’t harvested, it’s hard to justify detailed animal care protocols for embryos (for adult animals, that’s a different story…but I didn’t do experiments on adult animals.) Now, of course, I’m working with spiders and flies, and no one cares what horrible crimes against God and nature I commit on them. I wouldn’t worry if the IRB decided that spiders need protection, because I’m doing entirely ethical work on them…I would just hate all the additional paperwork.

But it’s frightening to think this guy believes he can get approval to do whatever he wants to humans by recruiting a compliant board. Or that he can somehow escape data privacy requirements.

The ideal cop: paranoid and trigger-happy

Here’s some body cam footage from a Florida cop who was assaulted by an acorn. He hears a noise, drops and rolls and unloads a clip into his own police car, asks if he’s been hit, and gets his buddies to advance menacingly on the wounded vehicle.

It was all triggered by an acorn falling from a tree (who knows, it could have been thrown by an armed assault squirrel.) It would be comical, except for the sounds of the neighborhood citizens screaming in fear, and that they had a guy handcuffed and trapped in the backseat of the car. He’s fine, just traumatized, and the crazed cop has been fired.

Has anybody considered that maybe the cops have way too many guns? I’m not even talking about defunding the police, but just taking most of their weapons away.

Nobody calls it the “gender chromosome”

Wow. Answers in Genesis falls back on the old simplistic notion that chromosomes determine sex (and gender!) in this video. It’s an amazingly bad clip.

OK, in 40 years of genetics experience, I’ve never heard the Y chromosome called the “gender chromosome” until now. Her absolutist, rigid definition of sex based on chromosome complement is archaic and ignorant. At one point, she rhetorically asks Can you change your chromosomes? Can you change what God knit you to be in the womb of your mother? You cannot “change your chromosomes”, but the pattern of gene activity changes throughout your life. God didn’t do any knitting in anyone’s womb, but you definitely can change — these Biblical ‘literalists’ are denying the reality of biological change, not just over evolutionary timescales, but on developmental timescales. What she is claiming is repulsively stupid.

You may wonder what Jennifer Rivera’s qualifications are. She holds an education doctorate in curriculum and instruction — it’s kind of odd how many creationists hold advanced degrees in education, which is nice, since it means they know how to teach, but they lack any knowledge of what content they should teach. She also has a BA in criminal justice, so AiG has her lecturing on forensic science.

I hope her understanding of fingerprints is better than her understanding of genetics and sex, but I’m afraid to look.

How love can last a lifetime

In today’s eco-devo class, we’re going to be talking about a general phenomenon: the physical reality of your feelings, as witnessed by changes in gene expression. Seems appropriate for Valentine’s Day, right? On Monday I lectured on a few principles of gene regulation, and how environmental factors are transduced into patterns of epigenetic activity. Today, the students are going to answer questions and give explanations on the mechanics of all that, and then on Friday, they’ll discuss this paper: “Maternal care as a model for experience-dependent chromatin plasticity?” by Meaney and Szyf. Here’s part of true love:

The students are going to explain it all to me later this week, so I don’t want to spill all the beans, but in short, these are the results of studies in mice. Happy baby mice are licked and groomed by their mothers, while less happy mice are neglected and stressed. Being groomed increased serotonin levels, which activates adenylate cyclase, which increases cytoplasmic cyclic AMP levels, which activates a serine-threonine kinase called PKA, which activates a DNA binding protein that demethylates specific DNA sequences. Some of these sequences regulate stress responses in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, so those loving mommy-snuggles are changing how baby mice respond to stressful situations, and those responses persist long into adulthood.

So maternal care, or lack of care, is drilling right down to the structure of DNA and making lifelong modifications to your feelings. At least, if you’re a mouse, and humans almost certainly have the same biochemical arrangement. And a scientist can rip out some of your DNA and find a different pattern of epigenetic marks in individuals who had a loving relationship with Mom versus those who were neglected. It’s written in your semi-permanent epigenetic record.

Of course, this is just one pathway, and there are multiple regulatory pathways modulating stress responses, so all is not lost if you have one bad mother. These individual effects are sort of permanent, though, and would require alternative compensatory mechanisms to be overcome. Also, keep in mind that bad mothers could be a product of bad grandmothers, and that these epigenetic modifications can ripple across multiple generations.

Indeed, maternal effects could result in the transmission of adaptive responses across generations. In humans, such effects might contribute to the familial transmission of risk and resilience. Finally, it is interesting to consider the possibility that epigenetic changes could be an intermediate process that imprints dynamic environmental experiences on the fixed genome, resulting in stable alterations in phenotype – a process of environment-dependent chromatin plasticity.

I hope you all have an opportunity to stimulate some environment-dependent chromatin plasticity today. If you don’t have a date, you can at least call your mom, or be kind to a child. Modify someone’s DNA with a hug!

I knew Armoured Skeptic was a kook before it was popular

Here’s a trip down memory lane: remember Armoured Skeptic? I first tangled with him about 9 years ago, when he was part of the YouTube misogynist mob, but his name popped up a few times since, never in a good context. He was a speaker at Mythcon, like all the good little regressive skeptics, and has sunk deeply into conspiracy thinking.

Notice that “skeptic” is in his name; his whole schtick was that as a good skeptically minded critical thinker, he could see right through the perfidy of feminazis and SJWs. Well, his content now includes…skepticism about the moon landings. Apollo 11 was a hoax, for some of the dumbest reasons ever.

There was a time when I was the target of his rants (his videos about me have been removed, for unknown reasons), because I was such a soy boy. It does my heart good to see how far he has fallen, and I’m pleased that I was sensible enough to stop paying attention to him long ago.

I might pay attention again when he starts promoting creationism, though.