A cable problem explained

In the past, I have complained bitterly about the difficulty of getting reliable cables for Apple computers, and also about how ridiculously overpriced they all are. I may have been wrong. There’s a good reason for that.

Adam Savage takes apart several USB-C cables, from a $3 cheapie to a $10 Amazon to a $130 (!!!!!) official Apple cable, and I learned something new.

Whoa…those expensive cables are packed full of complex circuitry, which I did not expect. Back in the day, I used to make custom RS-232 cable all the time — cut open the cable, splay out all the little wires, solder them to the appropriate pin in the connector, and you were done. That’s all it was, was a wire-to-wire connection between two adapters. I don’t think I could make a USB cable, and it’s not only the teeny-tiny wires that would exceed my soldering ability, but I wouldn’t be able to cope with all the miniature ICs in there.

Some days…

I had to finish grading an exam for one class, and compose an exam for another class, which will soon bounce back demanding that I grade it. Also, this week is dedicated to advising, so I’ve had a stream of students coming to my office for assistance in getting ready for spring term. That’s been a real roller coaster: some students are sailing through, excelling at their courses, so we have to talk about what gets them excited, while other students are struggling, so we have to talk about what to do to get back on track and just plain survive. I’m starting to feel drained.

I mentioned that I’m not getting a sabbatical next year (but definitely will in 2025), so I’ve been working with the discipline to revise my schedule. There’s some happy news there: this spring I’ll be teaching ecological developmental biology, and then, in the fall, Developmental Biology! I am floored! For the first time in way too many years, I’ll be teaching courses in my specialty, and I’ll be doing it over two consecutive semesters! It almost makes up for not getting a sabbatical. Almost.

Now I have to get back to the student train — I have another scheduled appointment in 5 minutes, and then my cell bio class.

Minnesotans detest our state flag

It’s far too busy, racist, and ugly. The state is currently accepting submissions for redesigns, and you can view all 2,123 online. Yikes.

As you might predict, there are a fair number of joke submissions, a lot of ugly flags (but none as ugly as the original), and many that are just trying too hard. So I’m gonna make it simple for you all. This should be the new flag, entry #408:

It’s original. It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s appropriate to our state. And best of all, it will strike terror in the hearts of our neighbors, which is what you always want in a flag.

The appalling inanity of Denyse O’Leary

See this person? She’s the biggest, most ignorant idiot at the Discovery Institute, which says a lot, since she’s in competition with Michael Egnor.

Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul; and with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor of the forthcoming The Human Soul: What Neuroscience Shows Us about the Brain, the Mind, and the Difference Between the Two (Worthy, 2025). She received her degree in honors English language and literature.

She occasionally pops up on Evolution News & Views with articles that are stunning in their stupidity and written in the style of a third grade book report. Her latest effort is titled Will the Octopus Ever Find Its Place in the Evolutionary Tree?

Here you go, Denyse. Here’s its place in the evolutionary tree.

That turns up in less than 30 seconds with a google search. Scientists know where the octopus fits in the evolutionary tree. Really, Denyse is a clueless moron.

She then continues to throw out a series of non sequiturs based on her total ignorance of the subject she is writing about.

Just why the octopus — a short-lived, solitary, invertebrate exotherm — should seem as intelligent as a monkey has become quite the puzzle in recent years. Typical evolutionary explanations don’t really work. The octopus’s biological inheritance is precisely the type that we don’t associate with intelligence. For one thing, it is much more closely related to clams than to monkeys.

Uh, right. That’s true. Cephalopods are more closely related to clams than to monkeys. So? People are more closely related to hagfish than they are to cephalopods. This means absolutely nothing.

What about the fact that the octopus has nine brains? Well, do nine invertebrate brains add up to more intelligence than one? That’s a question worth asking because it probably wouldn’t work with grasshoppers or worms. That is, both types of life form have brains but it isn’t clear how an installation of nine of them in a single individual would be any smarter than just one.

The octopus does not have 9 brains. It has a network of distributed ganglia in addition to a central ganglion.

Our nervous system is more concentrated in a large brain, but we also have a substantial network of ganglia, an autonomic nervous system, and an enteric nervous system. Grasshoppers and worms also have a chain of ganglia. What is her point? I don’t think she knows.

Naturally, the octopus has been singled out for a lot of research attention and a recent genetic find has attracted attention: A detailed genetic analysis found that the common octopus has 2.8 billion base pairs of genes…

For comparison, humans have about three billion. Chimpanzees have about the same. Is a large genome a necessary factor in advanced intelligence? It’s too early to be sure but the researchers hope to advance investigations into “more distantly related molluscs such as clams or snails” — species hardly known for intelligence. That might provide a more focused comparison.

Again, what is her point? We have 3 billion base pairs in our genome, so do chimpanzees, so do mice. Axolotls have 32 billion base pairs. There is no correlation between number of base pairs and intelligence. She hasn’t done the most basic, crude level of research to answer the question.

Some other finds about octopus intelligence in recent years give us some sense of why one researcher wondered if the species had an extraterrestrial origin. As PBS tells it,

The unique nature of octopus intelligence has sparked a rather peculiar debate recently: A group of researchers … has suggested that an octopus’ mind might seem so foreign because it may be alien. The hypothesis, published in 2018, states that octopus evolution may have arisen, in part, because of a retrovirus (a type of RNA virus) delivered to Earth by an asteroid during the Cambrian explosion about 541 million years ago.

Oh god. She’s digging deep into the fringe, loony brigade — she’s citing sources from the panspermia mafia, which are not at all credible. When you’re citing people who claim Squids are from SPAAAAAAAAACE!, you lose.

Now she’s just going to throw more shit at the wall, but nothing is going to stick.

Anyway, here are some of the other finds researchers puzzle over:

Many sources have noted that each arm of an octopus can communicate with other arms, bypassing the brain. But, says behavioral neuroscientist and astrobiologist Dominic Sivitilli (who does not think that octopuses are aliens!), it’s even more complex than that: “There are tens of thousands of both chemical and mechanical receptors in each sucker,” he says. “To put that into perspective, each of your fingertips has a few hundred mechanical receptors.”

So octopuses have a well-integrated nervous system and a rich sensory repertoire, therefore…what? We’re supposed to be surprised that they exhibit complex behaviors? I don’t even know what she’s arguing anymore.

Such a system of information-gathering seems fundamentally different from that of the intelligent mammals we know. That raises a question. Are comparisons in intelligence between octopuses and, say, mammals even meaningful?

Another factor that may be linked to high cephalopod intelligence is gene editing…

Hey, I just finished a week of lecturing to my students about post-translational and post-transcriptional modification of gene products. Every organism does it. Cephalopods have one flavor of post-transcriptional modification that they use extensively, which is interesting, but not the game changer Denyse imagines, and it has nothing to do with differences in intelligence. I don’t think she has any idea what’s going on in molecular biology.

In February of this year researchers got a look at octopus brain waves and found out, in one reporter’s words, that their brains behave in an “alien” way…

This is what scientists like to call an “active research area.” It is anyone’s guess whether the octopus will ever find its way into a tidy evolutionary tree. Perhaps it’s not wise to wade in with that goal foremost in mind.

I already did that, see the top of the post.

I am totally mystified about why the Discovery Institute continues to promote someone as obviously dumb and uneducated as Denyse O’Leary — she can’t even write well, despite her degree in English. My current hypothesis is that they keep her around because her existence is an affront to intelligent people everywhere — you know, the Darwinian thought police like P. Z. Myers. Alternatively, a simpler hypothesis might be that all the people managing the Discovery Institute are just as stupid as Denyse O’Leary, she’s simply worse at masking it in front of the public.

Dramatic Toaster

We’ve owned a very bad toaster for years. It was slow, cheap, and it had this ambiguous dial with no labeling that you ‘adjusted’ to set how dark your bread would be toasted — but without any markings, it was basically random. You diddled the dial and hoped it wouldn’t burn it, or you hovered over the toaster watching it feebly glow, and then if you started to see smoke you’d push a cancel button. It was terrible, but serviceable.

My daughter came to visit and was shocked at how us poors live. We don’t even have a decent toaster! When we visited her a few weeks ago, she was in the process of moving to Madison, and she gave us her old toaster. It was a Cuisinart. It looked like a polished slab of steel, with an LED display to let you know the settings, and most amazingly, you pushed a button after you add bread, and a motor gracefully lowered it into the device. When it was done, it didn’t pop up, the motor raised the toast dramatically and presented it to you.

That is how, in the morning, I have Dramatic Toast with my breakfast.

Why do I tell you this story? Because this morning I saw a photo of the back end of a Tesla Cybertruck.

That’s my new toaster! Very nice.

Let the gnashing of teeth commence

OK, I have to add another grievance to the pile. We’re getting ready for spring semester registration, and our students are expected to meet with their advisors in the next few days, so I’ve got appointments stacking up — but that’s not the grievance. I like that we require students to get regular advising sessions, rather than suddenly having deficiencies show up as they’re trying to graduate.

The problem is that all student records are now computerized (I remember when we’d have file folders full of pieces of paper, instead). Preparing for an advising meeting involves going to a link on the university website, which is supposed to give us all the relevant student records. This is what I see when I go through the prescribed channels:

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

I’ve got requests from students to enroll in some of my courses, and I was trying to get the necessary permission codes to send them so they could do that. All weekend long, all I saw was

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

I’ve got three students scheduled for advising meetings this morning, and like a responsible advisor I go to look up their academic records, and what do I see?

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

This is a centralized service provided by the entire great big University of Minnesota system, and it fucking doesn’t work. We’ve got a database we need to do our job, and we are constantly locked out of it.

Space bastards vs. space geeks

I told you yesterday that I’d let you know when my copy of A City on Mars arrived. It did! Yesterday! I’ve already started reading it, and I’m already happy with it.

Finally, it’s a book about sending humans to space that takes a realistic position: no jingo, no hyper-optimism, and an awareness that enthusiastic boosterism about space travel is a cult-like religion. It sets up the contrast in the introduction: that there are space geeks who fervently believe in the importance of colonizing space for a variety of reasons (most of them bogus), and there are space bastards who keep crashing the optimism by pointing out the problems. The authors side with the space bastards. So do I.

My opinion is that humans are a kind of animal that is well-adapted to a broad range of climates, but are still dependent on a narrow set of environments — we require plentiful water, about 20% oxygen, trace amounts of carbon dioxide, an air pressure between 100 mm Hg and 800 mm Hg, about 1 g of gravity, etc., etc., etc. We can survive briefly outside that range, but we sure don’t thrive and prosper. If ever you’ve raised tropical fish, for instance, you know that living things are extraordinarily sensitive to minor deviations from their ideal environment, and humans also have restrictions we take for granted. Biologically, we’re unsuited to existence anywhere in the solar system outside our one planet — you know, the one we’re busy trashing, but which will never be as hostile and incompatible with life as any of the other places in space.

We’re never going to build viable colonies elsewhere, even on Mars, which is the next best option outside of Earth, and even at that it’s poisonous and dead. I think I’m more negative about the prospects than the Wienersmiths, but it’s still a relief to find a source that recognizes the realities of life in space. It’s reassuring, even.

Another good sign

Moms for Liberty, that horrible collection of hateful Karens, made a big push in yesterday’s election to take over more school boards. It didn’t go well for them.

Moms for Liberty, the right-wing “parental rights” group advocating a hardline anti-woke agenda in America’s schools, had a rough night in Tuesday’s elections for school board seats around the country.

The organization, considered an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, endorsed scores of candidates in school districts in several states from Alaska to North Carolina. But the group’s record backing book bans, opposing racially inclusive lessons in classrooms, and pushing anti-LGBTQ messages seemingly failed to connect with voters in multiple ballots.

Pennsylvanians didn’t like them.

A “voter guide” from the group earlier this year recommended candidates in five districts but stressed that the messaging was “not an official endorsement.” All five of the Republican candidates in Central Bucks—which has been roiled for years by culture war rows—were included in the guide. But after Tuesday’s vote, the district’s school board was swept by Democrats who won five seats.

Pennridge, another school district in Bucks County, was also closely watched. The GOP-led school board made headlines in July after a curriculum consultant it hired likened his work to a fox in a henhouse during a Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia, reportedly telling attendees he wanted to remake schooling for “our side.”

On Tuesday, all five of the school board’s open seats went to Democrats. According to WFMZ, the rejected Republican candidates ran under the name “Protect Pennridge” and had advocated a policy requiring kids to use restrooms and play on sports teams which aligned with their biological sex.

This was a nation-wide phenomenon. Being endorsed by Moms for Liberty was the kiss of death.

But losses also mounted in other states. As of Wednesday morning, three of four candidates endorsed by the group were trailing in their races in Loudoun County, Virginia, where Democrats were projected to hold the board. MfL candidate Michael Rivera lost by 6 percentage points after all votes had been counted, while endorsed candidate Chris Hodges lost his race to a Democrat. Joe Smith narrowly lost out by just 174 votes. Deana Griffiths, another MfL endorsed candidate, was ahead by a single percentage point in her race in the Ashburn District.

Here in Minnesota, voters also did a good job of kicking them out.

In Minnesota, all four candidates put forward by MfL were wiped out in the race for the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District. None of them managed to attract double-digit support, with voters predominantly favoring three incumbents and one newcomer to the school board.

Huh. Who knew that hating gay and trans people wasn’t a winning position in elections?

We survived another election day!

The last big election I followed intensely was in 1980, Reagan vs. Carter. I stayed up late with a group of friends, watching the returns into the early hours of the morning, cheering at every fleeting sign of hope and groaning at the stupidity of the electorate. I learned my lesson. Vote, then turn off the TV and the radio and wait for the official results, because cheerleading does nothing but drain your emotional resources dry.

We had a lesser election yesterday, but there were still issues that mattered in other states than my own, so I ignored the minutiae of the pointless news coverage and waited until today to find out if my cynical half was going to be grimly validated, or my optimistic half was going to see glimmerings of promise. I seem to be seeing good news today.

Here’s a newspaper summary:

  • Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) turned aside a challenge from Trump-backed state Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) relatively easily in a red state.
  • Ohio became the latest red-leaning state to vote in favor of abortion rights on the ballot — and by a large margin. It passed Issue 1, enshrining the right to abortion into the state constitution. The pro-abortion-rights position has now won on all seven state ballot measures since Roe v. Wade was overturned in mid-2022. Turnout was also strong in Ohio, suggesting this issue continues to animate voters.
  • Democrats not only avoided a potential GOP takeover of Senate in much-watched Virginia, but they actually flipped the state House, taking full control of the legislature.

Yeah, I’ll take it.

The most promising outcome from my perspective is that Republicans remain shackled to their regressive anti-woman views on reproductive rights, and it’s dragging them down. Those are ideas that only win them votes in radically religious districts, and we can only hope that electorate becomes less relevant, as they also seem to be distracted by the shiny baubles of MAGA and conspiracy theories. As Amanda Marcotte explains,

But Republicans aren’t quite powerful enough, yet, to ban abortion without ever having to answer to the voters over it. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, voters have repeatedly expressed their outrage at the polls. Not only do people turn out to back ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights, Democrats who run on the right to choose have been overperforming at the polls. It’s one reason some observers feel that, despite President Joe Biden’s poor poll numbers now, he has a good chance of winning in 2024.

In response, Republicans haven’t backed off their anti-choice views. Instead, the’ve tried to bamboozle the voters into thinking that Republicans aren’t as radical as they really are. Republicans have played word games, hoping that by rebranding with terms like “pro-baby” or bullying journalists into using the “limits” instead of “bans,” they could somehow trick people into not noticing their rights are being stripped.

Tuesday’s election showed voters are not fooled.

Overall, the election was a solid reminder that voters may be confused on issues from the economy to labor rights, but on one thing, they are quite clear: They do not like abortion bans. And they keep making that view known at the polls.

Don’t get cocky, though! The anti-woman, anti-equality bloc still exists, is still loud, and still gets absurdly over-funded by privileged billionaires. We have to keep fighting back against their nonsense, but these victories are encouraging.

Addressing all the important questions about living in space

I have Zach and Kelly Weinersmith’s book, A City on Mars, on order. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m seeing excerpts all over the place that let me know I’m going to find this one interesting. It asks all the important questions!

Can you have sex in space?

Astronauts have confirmed over the past few decades that in space, the flesh is willing. But truth be told, we don’t even know if you can actually do the fun part of making space kids. While the moon and Mars provide some gravity, a vast majority of data on space physiology comes from orbital space stations, where astronauts hang in constant free fall. Weightlessness is ideal for physics problems but not for intercourse; a nudge toward you will send you flying backward with equal and opposite momentum. Without the familiar frame of reference provided by Earth’s gravity, concepts like “top” and “bottom” are without physical meaning. All of this will make the orientationless mambo awkward. The space popularizers James and Alcestis Oberg wrote in 1986 that those who attempt the act “may thrash around helplessly like beached flounders until they meet up with a wall they can smash into.”

Assuming this is undesirable, you’ll want something that keeps people together. The engineer and futurist Thomas Heppenheimer called for an “unchastity belt.” Another concept, pitched by Samuel Coniglio, a former vice president of the Space Tourism Society, is the “snuggle tunnel.” There’s also Vanna Bonta’s 2suit, which would keep a weightless couple connected via Velcro straps.

I don’t know…those options sound like they could be experimented with here on Earth, so why go to space?

After thrashing around helplessly like beached flounders, you may work up an appetite. What to do next? Have you considered space cannibalism?

Professor, prolific author, and triathlete, Dr. Erik Seedhouse wrote an analysis of space cannibalism in “Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration.” We don’t know Mr. Seedhouse personally, and he didn’t respond to our email, but we will note that his book’s index contains precisely one entry on “behavioral challenges,” a very important topic, but five entries on the gustatory mode of crew integration.

Seedhouse asks: “Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers. You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do?… One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.”

He argues that the largest people should sacrifice themselves first, since they both consume and provide the most food. We don’t know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn’t find his height and weight online, and honestly we’re scared to ask.

Mostly because his book includes a weirdly detailed look at how to butcher Homo sapiens. Also, on page 144, the reader will find a photo of ten astronauts floating happily in space, with the caption: “In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?”

Is one of the space people Elon Musk? I think that would influence my answer. He doesn’t look particularly appetizing, so this would be a question of performing a distasteful service that would benefit all of humankind.

I’ll let you know when my copy of the book arrives. The first thing I’ll be looking for in the index is “spiders,” because I think they’d thrive particularly well in low-G environments. Is the city on Mars specifically for spiders?