Tonight was movie night

I’m beginning my weekly duties as a volunteer projectionist at the Morris theater, which I will try to do once a week. It was not a great experience — it involves a lot of standing and some walking around, and my knee is not quite ready for it. After two hours, I was getting some unpleasant spasms, and was seriously concerned that it might buckle under me, so I had to go home early (no worries, there were 3 of us training or in training.)

It’s all good exercise, though, so maybe in another week or two I’ll be a bit more robust. I think next time I’ll wear a knee brace.

This is the time to come to Morris to watch Masters of the Universe or Mortal Kombat under my supervision. Sorry, we don’t have something better. We do have Disclosure Day starting this weekend, and we have Kung Fu Panda as a free matinee. We also have the classic Jurassic Park on the 22nd, as part of a special deal with the Met Lounge if you think you’ll need beer to survive it.

Do you remember…?

Who remembers the Secular Policy Institute? It still exists, it has a mission statement.

The Secular Policy Institute (SPI) is a think tank organization of thought leaders, writers, scholars and speakers with a shared mission to influence public opinion and promote a secular society. We believe governmental decisions and public policies should be based on available science and reason, and free of religion or religious preferences.

The latest news from SPI is dated 2016; they published a newsletter in 2020. It seems to be moribund.

Who remembers the atheist movement in the mid-2010s? It was crumbling fast, all these different groups were scrambling to stake out a position, and one of them was the Secular Coalition of America, which also still exists, and is actively lobbying the government for secular rights. But for a while it was led by someone named Edwina Rogers.

Who remembers Edwina Rogers? She was a Republican strategist who briefly led the SCA before getting fired in 2014, and then scurried off to found this pointless SPI think-tank.

We’re talking ancient history here, petty derailments of the atheist cause that plagued various groups over a decade ago. You probably don’t care about any of it. I don’t care about any of it. I hadn’t given any thought to SPI or Edwina Rogers for ten years.

But the other day, I got a legal notice from a real lawyer on behalf of Edwina Rogers that I had 14 days to delete two posts, one from 2015 and the other from 2017, claiming that they were in violation of copyright and were defamatory. The merely defamatory page is basically a quote from an SPI representative.

“I’m starting to believe that the reason the secular movement doesn’t have more women is the women. Prove me wrong.”

The quote is accurate, and I agree that it puts SPI in an ugly light, but I didn’t make it up. Don’t complain to me about the fact that SPI had several misogynists on staff.

The other post they want deleted is full of my opinions, and includes a promotional photo publicly posted by SPI, that features Dawkins and Harris and Shermer mugging for the camera. Back then this was something they wanted to advertise, but times have changed and now they’re apparently embarrassed by the situation. Mainly, though, it’s about the unsavory reputation of one Jonny Monserrat, and linked to his history of lawsuits.

I guess you better go check those old posts now, just in case I have to take them down. I don’t know that I will, because there’s nothing factually inaccurate in either of them, but jesus fuck I am tired of these corrupt cowards who now feel enabled to silence anyone who ever criticized them. Of course, most of you weren’t paying any attention to those topics in 2015, or have completely forgotten that period of atheist drama, or think Edwina Rogers and Jonny Monserrat are being really stupid. How many of you have bothered browsing the archives here from over a decade ago? But now I have to deal with lawyers again.

Someone needs to mention Barbra Streisand to those people.

Another creationist falls into my cunning trap

This morning, I was surprised by a comment on this YouTube video, in which I pointed out the fallacies of a creationist, Rob Carter. That video starts with me summarizing my relevant background as a developmental biologist. This commenter then makes this scurrilous accusation!

Rob Carter is correct, and PZ Myers, as an old-fashioned population geneticist, is wrong. Don’t you understand that environmental conditions and factors affect the organisms’ epigenomes? DNA is just a passive information data repository and its reading is completely controlled and regulated by epigenetic mechanisms and factors.

First of all, did this guy even listen to the video before he rushed in with his knee-jerk defense of Rob Carter?

Secondly, I am not a population geneticist. I am a professor at a small liberal arts college, which means I have to be a jack-of-all-trades within my discipline — I can teach population genetics at the undergraduate level, but I would never claim to be a pop gen guy. That’s the domain of people like Dan Stern Cardinale and Zach Hancock on YouTube, and they could tie me in knots with their expertise. They definitely shred Rob Carter, who doesn’t even understand it as well as I do.

I am primarily a developmental biologist. That’s my focus and my interest, although in recent years I’ve been expanding that focus into eco-evo-devo…I’ve taught courses in that. My research is all about looking at the development of local spiders, to identify what factors in each species development shapes their adaptation to a particular niche, and how we can have so many different species of spiders co-existing in my backyard. To claim that I don’t understand the multiple factors that affect development is ludicrous. Rob Carter is just droning out buzzwords with little comprehension, and to someone who actually knows the subject he is discussing, he comes off as a fool.

Just a reminder: 15 years ago, in Dublin, Ireland, I was confronted by a group of Muslim apologists who tried to bamboozle me with claims about Mohammed’s revelations about development. They asked (at the 7 minute mark), Are you an embryologist?, to which I said “Yes,” and set them aback a bit.

I’ve always said I am a developmental biologist. My commenter was trying to make a peculiar ad hominem, suggesting that I was wrong because I’m only an old-fashioned population geneticist, and then rattling off a bunch of concepts that are actually the meat-and-potatoes of developmental biology.

Also, that DNA is just a passive information data repository nonsense is a strategem used by creationists to deny the significance of changes to the genome in evolution.

The only reason to make this movie was money

Masters of the Universe is playing at the Morris Theatre right now, and I was lured in. It’s terrible. It’s two hours of pointless reiteration of an intellectual property that was contrived in the 1980s as a tool to sell toys — it had a poorly animated cartoon show, a glorified advertisement, that played every afternoon in that sweet spot when kids were getting home from school. It was repetitive noise. Every episode had roughly the same structure: a squad of freakishly weird characters, led by a bad guy with a skull for a face, would try to take over a castle guarded by a squad of mostly human, muscle-bound leaders, and be inevitably defeated. The same characters fought each other over and over again, and each one was for sale at Toys’R’Us as an action figure. Mattel cleaned up. Every 8-12 year old boy wanted a set of action figures they could play with as they watched the cartoon, and they would bring them to the playground to battle with their friends’ toys.

I know because my kids grew up in the 1980s, and we had to buy all the toys. On their demands, we had He-Man and Beast Man and Moss Man and Man-At-Arms and Skeletor and Orko and others, and we also had the Castle Grayskull play set and various vehicles. This was also the time in my career when we were frequently moving to various places around the country, and one of the sadder things about that was frequently packing up everything we owned into a truck and driving to a different state, a different apartment. One of my memories was the final step in moving out, and that was going through the rooms and sweeping up the detritus and throwing it into one last box. It was always an assortment of He-Man figures and accessories that I had to rescue lest the kids yell at me.

So I had to go see this movie. It was my mental equivalent of tidying up the garbage in the corners of my brain.

It is a competently made movie. It’s got some good actors, Idris Elba and Alison Brie, and some new (to me) players, who did a good job, although I wish all of them were acting in good movies. I normally detest Jared Leto, but in this movie he’s unrecognizable behind a skull face and a comically affected accent, which is the only way to see Leto in anything. The plot is familiar: Skeletor and his weird pack of freaks take over the world of Eternia, He-Man shows up with a magic sword and beats everyone up (there is a lot more killing of bit players in the movie than in the old TV series), and the status quo is restored. Ho hum.

I kept wondering why this movie was made. It wasn’t for Art, because it’s entirely derivative and lacking in novelty. It wasn’t to tell a story that would resonate with viewers, because it could have been a cheap 20 minute cartoon rather than an expensive 2 hour movie. It wasn’t to provide moral instruction, although it did include an appearance by Orko at the end to briefly summarize the lesson taught by the show, just like the old cartoon. I don’t even recall what the message was, it was so perfunctory and so irrelevant to the movie I’d just watched. No, this was clearly the product of a thought by a marketing executive at Mattel. Let’s take another pass at the wallets of the 1980s generation that we successfully bilked 40 years ago! It’s a naked attempt to milk nostalgia.

They got me. I contributed to their $54 million box office on a movie that cost $200 million to make. Be smarter than me and don’t fall for it. The movie is not good enough to outweigh the bad faith premise behind its creation.

Being apolitical is political

The American Diabetes Association has responded to the little incident at a recent meeting, and issued a formal statement.

As many of you are now aware, an incident took place at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) Scientific Sessions.

As a 501(c)(3) organization, the ADA has safeguards in place to ensure that it complies with all IRS regulations. This includes maintaining a strictly nonpartisan environment at all organizational events and functions while engaging across party affiliations to advance our mission. We have always, and will continue to welcome scientific inquiry, respectful dialogue, and diverse perspectives in the pursuit of better outcomes for people living with diabetes and obesity.

Oh. They were being nonpartisan. That claim doesn’t hold up.

When the opposition is ignorant, advancing unscientific ideas, and is using them to consciously dismantle the apparatus of science to silence disagreement, you can’t silence yourself to prevent conflict. They have a political agenda and are distorting and destroying science to achieve it, and conceding the argument in advance with silence is political, too — and it’s favoring their position.

I’m not at all impressed with the cowardly, conservative leadership of the ADA.

Model ship building fad

I just posted about building a ship model, and what happens? Ken Ham posts about building a model ark. I begin to suspect that he’s copying me.

We’ve partnered with an Australian businessman to produce a beautiful model kit of Noah’s ark (based on the Ark Encounter’s design) made from authentic Australian hoop pine. Available in three different sizes from “small” (over two feet long and 506 pieces) to large (over four feet long and 760 pieces!), this scale model is extremely detailed and comes apart to show off the three decks. Once complete, it makes a great display for your home or for churches, or it can be used as a conversation starter for outreach.

It’s not that detailed because it fails to include the large concrete office building asymmetrically grafted onto one side. The article reveals the construction method of the model.

Ick. It’s assembled from thin sheets of laser-cut pressboard, one of the cheapiest, laziest way to make a model…and which will almost certainly be incapable of holding together in water. It wouldn’t be worth the $200 and/or $800 they are asking for the two model sizes. I guess the extra layer of fakery and religion must add value to this piece of crap. My model only had love added, and I didn’t charge anyone for it.

Don’t waste your money on this inauthentic, cheaply-made nonsense.