An exercise in geography

It’s a journey of increasing uneasiness. A guy in an office is browsing Google Earth, and sees a dark circle in the middle of nowhere in Madagascar, and gets curious: he sees buildings inside of an old crater. He traces satellite photos back in time, and learns that the buildings weren’t there before 2008. He digs deeper, never leaving his office, but looking for photos and people on the internet who might help him figure out what’s going on in this remote place, which has virtually no footprint on the web.

So far, I’m with him. This is interesting! How much can you figure out about an isolated spot on the globe without lifting your butt from a chair? He’s calling up people in Madagascar, scientists and college professors, and asking them what’s going on in that crater. It’s purely academic, he just seems to be getting a bit obsessively invested in this random question, and now he’s pestering people on the island.

Then he hires a half dozen people to make the trek from the nearest city to this isolated place. He has the money, he can draft a few locals to do some leg work for him, all to satisfy his curiosity. Unfortunately, it’s the rainy season, the roads are terrible, they can’t get there.

So he waits for the dry season, hires another bunch of locals to make a second trip, and they get there at last. It’s a village of about 300 people. They’re tense and worried. They’re suspicious and wonder why these strangers have suddenly shown up on their doorstep.

They don’t tell them that this well-off white man a few thousand miles away had seen their homes from outer space and had spent a lot of time and money to invade their privacy and make a video telling the whole world about them. As a reward for exposing these people, the video creator got a million views on YouTube and thousands of comments telling him how great he was. But what does the village get? Did they even want this kind of attention?

Here’s the video. It’s professionally done. A lot of people spent a lot of money satisfying idle curiosity, which you’d think I’d appreciate, but I don’t know…how would I feel if a film crew showed up at my house, and they announced that this wealthy Malagasy guy was kind of curious about what I was doing and had commissioned them to come report on how I spent my time? He was too busy to make the trip himself, but he’d definitely make sure everyone knew my business.

Maybe I’d feel less queasy about it all if the narrator had cared enough to make the trip himself, and wasn’t parading the people around on the internet like some kind of exhibit.

So…how’s Xitter doing nowadays?

It’s just getting better and better.

Last week, Musk had said that “all” X Premium Plus subscribers would get access to “Grok,” a “rebellious” ChatGPT competitor with “fewer guardrails” that Musk has said was trained on Twitter’s own data, something that Microsoft once tried, creating the world’s most racist chatbot in less than 24 hours back in 2016.

Musk outright lied, saying Grok is “being opened up slowly to Premium+ users,” a statement he likely made because a popular account posted that Grok was a feature of Premium+ subscriptions, only to be met with a community note saying that “most users with X Premium+ still lack access to Grok,” despite Musk posting two days beforehand that you should “subscribe to Premium+ for no ads and access to our Grok AI.”

I am not at all interested in yet another chatbot, especially not one trained on Xitter content, and I’m not going to ever be a Premium+ subscriber, but I was entertained by this idea:

In the event that Grok is truly trained on Twitter’s posts (after all, this is an Elon Musk product), it will become what Jathan Sadowski calls a “habsburg AI,” a “system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”

I, for one, look forward to the hideous, inbred, mutant essays that will be unleashed on the internet by this development. They can’t be worse than what mere humans can generate.

Gibbering quietly in my corner

Welcome to Stress City! Yesterday was exams and exams, all very traditional pen-and-paper things, and right now the ugly pile of pulp is festering in a bag, awaiting the kiss of my red pen. These have to be done by 1:00 tomorrow, because the cell bio students will want to know their standing so they can decide whether they should take the optional final or not. I stand between a decision to go home for the holidays right away, or stay in Morris through next week for another exam. There may be poundings on my office door escalating to deployment of Grond if I don’t get it done.

I cleared my desk yesterday by submitting the online exam for my intro course early. That one is due at 5pm on Saturday, which is cutting it close: I have to depart for the airport at 6am Sunday, so my Saturday night party is more grading. Also packing for a flight.

Oh, right, I also have a couple of term papers I have to finish grading today.

Between that 1pm deadline today, and 5pm due date tomorrow, I have to compose the two final exams that they’ll have to answer to next week, while I’m away in Seattle. That’s right, I’ll be grading exams while visiting my poor sick mother.

Normally, my end of semester work load isn’t this bad, but normally I don’t stack an urgent flight across the country on top of it.

Johnson’s johnson

I’m sorry, but I was up at 5 putting the finishing touches on two exams I’m giving this afternoon, and which I have to get graded by tomorrow morning, because I’m giving a third exam tomorrow, which also has to be graded quickly. I’m in a bit of a haze right now, but I feel a need to comment on this:

Ultra-creepy millionaire Bryan Johnson has increased his creepiness score ten-fold by hooking up a machine to his penis every night to record its unconscious activity, and worst of all, is bragging about it on the internet. He’s spending $2 million per year to try and game aging, getting scores on arbitrary metrics that he can point to and brag that his body parts have different ages.

Now he wants to have the penis of an 18 year old.

He claims he now has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the fitness of an 18-year-old.

I know it’s an old joke, but where does he keep them? In jars on his mantelpiece?

I apologize again. My only excuse is that I’m addled with exhaustion and will be getting no respite until next week.

Hey, I’d look younger than my age if I could spend a few million dollars to hire people to write and grade these exams.

Plagiarism, the scandal du jour

After pointing out the excessive length of that otherwise praiseworthy hbomberguy video, I see that it is prompting some useful followups. For instance, here’s an academic explaining the academic perspective on plagiarism, in a mere 27 minutes.

That’s useful! I say a lot of similar things in my writing class, and I’ll probably assign this video for them to watch as homework. Plagiarism is an important problem that we try to hammer against with frequent reinforcing messages.

By the way, hbomberguy has put out a 20 minute video focused on just the Illuminaughtii plagiarism scandal. It’s amazing how this topic has caught fire on YouTube this week — some of those people who have been profiting mightily from ripping off other people’s writing had better watch out.

The Supreme Court believes in magic

You wouldn’t believe how popular this sentiment is on the right-wing/New Age side of the internet. It’s bullshit.

Regulation isn’t free. It costs money to compel for-profit companies to comply with the rules that benefit them in the long run, but cost in the short run. Conservatives don’t like that, and want to be free to ignore, for instance, conservation regulations (I know, it’s sad that conservatives don’t like conservation). Now the Supreme Court is getting into the act.

On New England fishing boats, cramming another person into a space that barely fits a half-dozen employees already is a big ask. But the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Commerce, requires that herring fisheries notify it before embarking on fishing trips, and on half of such trips, a federal inspector rides along. The inspector checks the crew’s compliance with federal rules about where they can fish, how many of which types of fish they can catch, and what kind of gear they can use in the process. The rule also requires that companies help foot the bill for its inspectors’ salaries—about $710 a day. Fishery owners say this reduces their annual returns by about 20 percent.

Last year, four fisheries challenging the rule asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to this practice. And last week, the Court granted certiorari in the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The justices will hear oral argument sometime next fall.

You can trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing, right? Ha ha, no. The Supreme Court doesn’t believe in science.

The Supreme Court is one of the most scientifically illiterate bodies in government, but why don’t we let it take over federal regulation? That is the basic question behind Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for argument next month at the Supreme Court, and it should scare you. To those only recently paying attention, the court’s disdain for the scientific consensus, as evidenced in cases like West Virginia v. EPA, may seem surprising. However, even before the installation of its conservative supermajority, the court had long viewed scientific evidence that runs contrary to its policy preferences with contempt.

Skepticism of an inconvenient scientific consensus is nothing new for the Supreme Court, particularly for the conservatives. In Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 case on the constitutionality of capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, Justice William Brennan pointed out the conservative majority’s “evident but misplaced disdain” for scientific evidence, particularly that of the social sciences. In Lockhart v. McCree, Justice William Rehnquist took it upon himself to disregard 14 of 15 submitted peer-reviewed studies, stating that the only reliable study happened to be the one that supported his position, contrary to the scientific consensus. Chief Justice John Roberts has gone so far as to call certain fields “sociological gobbledygook.”

Conservatives’ dislike of science does not stop at social sciences, though. In recent years, conservative justices have made statements completely at odds with the scientific consensus, including saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and taking the position that a surface connection between navigable waters is necessary for pollution of wetlands to matter. There is a strong scientific consensus contrary to each of these contentions, but the conservative justices chose to disregard it in favor of their prior opinions.

This is what happens when you let theocrats pack the courts. The only laws they’ll accept are the ones they’ve invented for themselves. You may recall this notorious quote.

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

That’s the law of the land now.

UIs matter

Well, this is a horror story about coding incompetence. There is this nice gadget that can be controlled from your phone to automagically dispense insulin, a real boon to diabetics. You just type how big a dose you need into your phone, and it signals and discreet little device to deliver it. No manual injections!

Except their software drops the initial decimal point. If you type “0.5”, it’s fine, it delivers 0.5 units of insulin. If you type “.5”, it ignores the decimal point, and delivers 5 units. You better not type “.50”, or oh boy, here comes 50 units.

This must have been a fun letter for Omnipod to send out.

Dear Valued Customer,

You are receiving this letter as our records indicate that you are a user of the Omnipod® 5 App from Google Play on your compatible Android smartphone. The app is part of the Omnipod 5 Automated Insulin Delivery System. This notice is a voluntary Medical Device Correction related to an issue with the Omnipod 5 App bolus calculator. Insulet has received 2 reports of adverse events related to this issue.
…
We have received reports from Omnipod 5 smartphone app users where the bolus calculator is not recording the decimal point if it is the first value entered when changing a bolus dose. If the user does not recognize the issue, this may lead to delivery of more insulin than intended, which can lead to severe hypoglycemia.

I’m imagining corporate lawyers having heart attacks when this bug was discovered.

Hey, computer science instructors, this’ll be a good example to use if your students complain about mundane data entry tasks!

Finally, a football game I might care about

You know I’m no fan of college football and think the whole institution is a perversion of the academic life, but there is an event coming up that makes me want to scream “GO DUCKS!”

The No. 8 Oregon Ducks (11-2) will play in the Fiesta Bowl against the No. 23 Liberty University Flames (13-0) on Jan. 1, the Bowl Season Committee announced on Sunday morning.

After a heartbreaking 34-31 loss to the No. 2 Washington Huskies (13-0) on Friday night in the Pac-12 Championship Game, the Ducks knew their playoff chances were gone, but still had a shot at making a New Year’s Six Bowl game.

As an alumnus of the University of Oregon, and as someone who utterly despises that bogus Christian sham of a “university”, Falwell’s Folly, I’d be tempted to watch the game so I could snarl my contempt of the jumped-up Bible college for a few hours. If it’s actually broadcast I might even put it on (but no, I don’t care enough to cough up cash for pay-per-view).

I didn’t even know about the playoff between my undergrad university, UW, and my grad school, UO, so I can’t get worked up about that game, either way. But hell yeah, stomp all over Liberty “University”. Make a Falwell cry. Although they probably don’t care either, Jerry (their ex-president) would probably be too busy having a ménage à trois with a poolboy.

Last week of the semester!

It’s the worst time of the year. I have to review everything I’ve taught this semester, I have to give final exams and papers, I have to grade everything that comes pouring in, and I have to do it with a hard deadline — everyone disappears after Friday. I also have to do this damned debate on Friday. And then I fly away to Seattle this weekend.

Oh well. One last surge of effort, and then I’m off until mid-January.