Not all astronauts know much about geology

The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd

How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.

Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.

The silence of the worms

I’ve been experimenting with feeding regimens for the spiders. What I’ve been doing is feeding twice a week with an excess of fruit flies until I feel like they’re big enough for mealworms. My feelings about their readiness for larger food are not reliable, and lately I’ve been seeing that these spiders are eager to hunt big game. Maybe I’ve been underestimating them.

So I lined up 15 containers with juvenile black widows, ranging from little guys about 5mm long to roughly twice that, and put a mealworm in each one. Then I left them alone, going to a meeting for an hour. I came back to a horrible sight.

Mealworms are like the cows or sheep of the invertebrate feedstock. They are quiet grazers that eat our vegetable scraps and don’t move very fast. I came back to all these containers of frantic, squirming, wiggling worms, they were writhing, flailing as if in agony. The spiders, even the smallest, were darting in to deliver small bites. A full grown spider would inject enough venom to kill quickly, within minutes, but these little fellows required multiple attacks to get a slow kill. It was ugly, and I felt sorry for the worms.

I came back the next day. All of them were dead, but in various states of digestion, from drained to blackening. My little carnivores are fierce and ruthless.

I’m going to have to change up my feeding schedule, switching from Drosophila, which are apparently little more than quick snacks to them, to mealworms as soon as they’ve got fangs big enough to puncture the cuticle. I should be able to cut back feeding from twice a week to once a week. I’ll just have to swallow my guilt.

The era of destruction

Deservedly or not, Harvard is the premiere research institution in the US, internationally renowned, magnificently endowed, so it’s shocking that Trump is demolishing our research capabilities nationwide.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.

We’re used to thinking that STEM departments are safe…but no more.

The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.

This isn’t just Harvard — universities across the country are tightening their belts to the point that whole disciplines are getting chopped. How do we recover from this?

All Trump knows how to do is destroy, just like he’s demolishing the east wing of the White House.

That’s symbolic of how this administration will be seen by history: a flag waving over a wrecking crew.

I waited too long to prepare for winter

I am resting at home, weak and weary, my knees knackered, because I have been on a quest that sent me staggering all over town. A quest that has ended in failure.

Where it began was the weather, freezing cold, bitter and blustery, conjoined with the fact that my wife labors every night until almost the midnight hour, when she comes home, tired and cold, to fall into bed seeking warmth and rest. I, on the other hand, am already in bed at that hour, and I am well insulated and tending to run hot; I’ve nestled down in snug pocket of sheets, blanket, and quilt, a cozy burrow of comfortable warmth, sleeping contentedly. My wife naturally reaches over to my side of the bed with feet like blocks of ice and fingers like icicles. This is a shocking trauma every night.

I decided to implement an easy, inexpensive solution: a pair of hot water bottles, low-tech and simple. The idea being that they would warm her side of the bed before she got in, she would clutch one to her chilly breast, and rest her frosty toes on the other, sparing me the frosty nightly surprise. Surely, this would be an easy quest!

First I visited the pharmacy on the far side of town. They were pleasant and helpful, and not so helpfully pointed out the shelf where these items were normally available. It is the onset of winter in Minnesota, unsurprisingly, the shelf was empty.

I crossed the street to Dollar Tree, it’s aisles cluttered with boxes and its staff hard at work taking down the Halloween supplies and putting up Christmas decorations. “Already?” I thought, but asked a clerk anyway. They had no idea if they ever had such things.

Disappointed, I trudged up the street to Homestead, a Walmart wanna-be run by a local fundamentalist church. I was reluctant, because I have been in this store before, and it hurts my brain…but at least they weren’t taking down the Halloween displays, because they never put them up in the first place, and their Christmas displays were just the Jesus merchandise they always have on show. They have a housewares section and a pharmacy, so maybe they would serve my needs, even as the constant tinkly worship music battered at my ears, frustrated at my lack of soul. I wandered about, before asking clerk if they had water bottles. “NO!” she exclaimed with outraged confidence, as if she feared I had sinful plans with such a diabolical device.

My last hope was the Ace Hardware store in town, which has an eclectic collection of miscellaneous household gear, but alas, no hot water bottles.

So I have come home, a frustrated failure, and turned to Amazon to order from the wicked Bezos.

They will not arrive until Friday.

I dread tonight, when in the darkness I hear the door open at midnight, and I will lie trembling in bed for the ice queen to slip between the sheets and reach over with Arctic claws to rip down my spine.

Fire Greg Abbott for pushing right wing ideologies instead of education

Imagine if universities tried to purge conservatives from our faculty. There’d be well-deserved protests from within the university as well as from without. We have strictly enforced policies for our hiring committees to prevent that from happening: our HR instructs us in the rules before every interview. You don’t get to ask candidates about politics, religion, or family matters…you interview exclusively on their qualifications to teach and do research.

This is not the policy when your administration is authoritarian and far right, and Texan.

Gov. Greg Abbott admitted in an X post on Sunday that Texas is purging professors with “leftist ideologies” — and people are not happy.

Abbott’s directive fits into a pattern of faculty changes and government interference on campuses across the state, including the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Texas State University.

“Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Abbott wrote in his post. “We must end indoctrination and return to education fundamentals at all levels of education.”

They must end indoctrination by purging the universities of people who oppose your ideological indoctrination. That’s blatant. No ideology but our ideology.

He’s a fucking fascist.

NFTs are still a thing?

I thought they were ugly, stupid, and pointless a few years ago, but apparently, there’s still a market for them.

Wait until they realize they don’t own them after all — they all belong to Amazon, and when Amazon sneezes, the bored apes all curl up and die.

Amazon owns everything, and the recent loss of service also meant that the Canvas application we use for teaching was having seizures, too. Fortunately, I wasn’t teaching this term, and even if I was, I go to class with all my teaching stuff stored locally on my laptop. Because I’m not a dumbass.