Rich people poison everything they touch

This might just be the final straw for me. The head Twit is pissed off and flinging lawsuits at Mark Zuckerberg for launching Threads, the Twitter alternative, and since they called off the childish plan to fight each other, now Musk has an even dumber suggestion.

Look. Guys. You’re both toxic to your brand. We all want to see less of you, not more. Musk only appeals to weird libertarian Nazis and people who have fallen for his techie facade; Zuckerberg is a dead-eyed charisma void beloved of racist grandmas. The more you put your faces on your social media service, the more I’m going to attach unpleasant associations to using that service.

I’m still on Twitter, for now, but not happy about it. I’m on Threads, unenthusiastically, but I can’t link to my pzmyers account there because, for unfathomable reasons, Threads, like Instagram, is only supposed to be used on your phone. I prefer Mastodon right now, because there are no billionaires marking their territory there.

I think I’ll just hunker down on Pharyngula. Bring back RSS!

This weekend was a bust

So disappointed. We found some old graves of dead Westads, and that’s about it.

Damn few spiders. I don’t know why. We were tromping around in nature preserves around Fertile, but spiders were scarce, we only found a handful. We didn’t even see many insects, other than ants, which were flourishing in the sandy soils of the old Lake Agassiz shoreline.

I was reduced to taking pictures of <shudder> flowers, out of a lack of worthy subjects.

All right, time for me to go home.

Return to the homeland

After completing our top-secret mission yesterday, we’ve allocated our day today to exploring the ancestral homeland. My mother was born in Gary, Minnesota in 1939, although she quickly escaped to the fjords of Washington state. My grandparents, Paul (1917-1989) and Nora (1915-1998) spent their youth in Fertile and Gary. My great-grandfather, Peter(1880-1970), and great-grandmother, Christina (1885-1974) lived here until the whole family made a great exodus West after WWII.

But it goes back further still! My great-great-grandparents, Jens (1850-1939) and Marit (1849-1933) all lived here, too! And before them, Marit’s father, Ole Solem (1821-1902) and Jens’ father, Dyre…but there the records start getting murky. All I know is that Dyre was born in Storen, Norway at some unknown date, and died in 1874.

Our plan is to visit a cemetery or two, and drop by the towns of Fertile and Gary, and there’s the Prairie Smoke Dunes Scientific and Natural Area to check out (of course we’re looking for spiders as we go). Those plans were complicated by the discovery that the Polk County Fair is going on in Fertile today…so we might have to stop in there for a bit, too.

Man, this place is flat. We’re on the old lake bed of Lake Agassiz, and I guess I’m not surprised that a bunch of old Norwegians fled this place for one with evergreen forests, mountains, and an ocean. They were probably put here to crush their intrinsic desire to build fleets of longboats and go raiding.

shhhh…secret mission

It was a plain white insulated box, tightly sealed, no hint of its contents. We drove north a hundred miles to our clandestine destination, there to make the exchange.

We met the North Dakotan operatives at a nondescript Dairy Queen in downtown Crookston. I quietly slid the box across the table. I accepted a bowl of ice cream. Mission accomplished.

We told no one the contents of the box. It was whisked away to undergo detailed analysis by scientists at the University of North Dakota. I won’t reveal what it is, even under torture. There’s no way you can make me tell. Try your worst!

You missed your chance!

I’m sorry, the last day to register for the International Conference on Creationism was 3 July, so it’s too late for you. It will be held at Cedarville University, a glorified Bible college in Ohio.

It’s sponsored by a fine assortment of organizations dedicated to promoting ignorance:

I don’t think you’ll miss much. One of the things that struck me about the list of speakers at this meeting is just how familiar they all are. These are mostly the same old frauds who’ve been parroting nonsensical lies for years, in some cases, for decades.

  • Dr. William Barrick (Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, The Masters Seminary) — Theology
  • Dr. John Baumgardner (Vice President Logos Research Associates & Research Professor Emeritus, Liberty University) — Geophysical Modeling
  • Dr. Danny Faulkner (Researcher at Answers in Genesis and editor of the Creation Research Society Quarterly) – Danny Faulkner
  • Dr. Joe Francis (Dean of the School of Science, Mathematics, Technology and Health, The Masters University) — Biology
  • Dr. Aaron Hutchison (Professor of Chemistry and Forensic Science, Cedarville University) — Chemistry
  • Dr. Russell Humphreys (Independent Researcher & Board member of the Creation Research Society) — Physics
  • Dr. Matthew McLain (Associate Professor of Biological Science and Geoscience, The Masters University) – Education
  • Dr. Douglas Petrovitch (Teaches Ancient Egypt at Wilfrid Laurier University) — Archaeology
  • Dr. John Sanford (Director at Logos Research Associates) — Genetics
  • Dr. Andrew Snelling (Director of Research at Answers in Genesis) — Geology
  • Dr. Kurt Wise (Director of the Center for Creation Research & Professor of Natural History, Truett McConnell University) — Paleontology

I have to compare it to real conferences. There, you also find the old establishment giving review talks in plenary sessions, but the real meeting, the interesting and exciting new stuff, is given by hordes of grad students and post-docs presenting their current research. It’s a rich and complicated event with lots of people at all stages of their career talking things they’ve done that, mostly, no one else has done before.

Creationist conferences, not so much. It’s mostly old fuddy-duddies rehashing tired old arguments that have been repeatedly debunked and dismissed, and you have to pity any younger people who have been deluded and dragged into this mess. It’s just sad.

Also, is including representation from a few fringe ‘researchers’ at a Canadian university sufficient to call it an “international” conference? At the international meetings in the US that I’ve attended, I’m used to seeing a majority of the sessions led by European and Austrialian and Asian scientists.

They also tend not to be sponsored by religious institutions.

Variation is wonderful

I’m stealing a fascinating thread on Twitter from Kathleen DePlume. In some ways, it’s unsurprising: if you compound the natural variation in enough parameters, you’ll discover that everyone is unique. It’s a question of including broad tolerances, and the real question is…how broad do they have to be to accommodate 99% of humanity? And another question would be…don’t the remaining 1% deserve a place as well? The math is nifty but it isn’t the whole of human reality.

So, did you ever wonder why car seats and seatbelts are so wonderfully adjustable? It all goes back to cockpit manufacture.

The USAF wanted to make aircraft with seats and belts fitted to the “normal” airman; the tolerances weren’t too wide, but lots of fellas are normal, right?

Wrong.

As it turned out, hilariously wrong.

You see, they measured several thousand enlisted men (just men – these were the dark times before women were people) on just a few things.

Leg length, knee to ankle, hip to knee, various seat measurements. Seating height to shoulder.

Shoulder width. Arm length. Shoulder to elbow, elbow to wrist.

You get the point.

Measurements that would allow the cockpit and belts to be correct and safe, as long as they were “close enough” to the normal specifications.

So, after taking these measurements – a great undertaking, the measures got so good at it that they could do all 38* measurements in under 2 minutes – they analysed the data.

*I might be misremembering the exact number

They figured if every measurement had tolerances that fit 30% or so “normal” men, then they’d lose a few percent to the abnormally shaped weirdos (you know the ones – people whose arms are way longer than their height, or who have tiny hands compared to their feet?) they’d still fit at least 20% of their potential pilots into the custom measured Everyman cockpits, right?

Wrong.

So, so very wrong.

How many pilots do you think fit in the normal measurements on all 38 metrics?

Go on, take a guess. I’ll wait.

Actually, no I won’t, because I’m writing this as a thread.

Zero. The answer is zero.

Not a single soldier was within tolerances on all measurements.

Out of thousands and thousands of airmen measured, every last man was abnormal on at least one.

It turns out that while yes, arm length and leg length aren’t exactly independent (if you’re tall you probably have long arms AND long legs), their r-value isn’t anything like high enough for the purposes the Air Force had in mind. They’re probably long by different amounts.

So it isn’t as simple as going 0.3^38 (a number so small it should be obvious it’ll round to 0), it also wasn’t what they assumed (0.3x [almost 1]^37).

It was somewhere in between.

Okay, so where did that leave them?

It left them knowing with utter certainty that they could not design a static cockpit and recruit airmen to fit it.

They had to go the other way. Broaden the tolerances – make it so they could account for broad differences in measurements.

They had to invent adjustable seats. Adjustable straps for the safety harnesses, seats that could travel back and forth a little bit, that sort of thing.

Okay, but how does this relate to cars?

Well, there’s the obvious: once it’s been invented, why not use it in cars? But the older folk among us probably remember bench seats, and maybe even a time when you didn’t put your seatbelt on because you were insulting the driver if you did.

What changed?

Funnily enough, another clever statistician.

This one was tasked with keeping very expensive pilots alive after the Air Force had spent so much money training them up. He was supposed to be looking at the safety equipment within planes, but this was after the war, so…

…pilots weren’t actually dying in the air that much.

Mostly what killed dashing young men back in those days was car crashes.

So the statistician came back with the findings that pilots would live longer if they were forced to wear their damned seatbelts when driving.

Funnily enough, this was a huge part of the impetus to make it law that all passengers have to wear belts in cars.

It’s only sensible – but humans seldom do sensible things unless forced. And pilots are very much human.

So we all wear seatbelts now because pilots are expensive.

The moral of all this?

Mostly that maths is interesting; but also that if someone is jumping up and down demanding their right to call themself “normal”, they are full of sh*t and don’t know what they’re talking about.

Mathematically speaking.

Unfortunately, the thread lacks any mention of sources. I’d want to know a lot more about it before I could cite it as interesting history without any caveats.

Well, that’s going to ruin the weekend

No thank you. No meaty beer for me.

Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business host and former Trump economic advisor, raged against the idea of “plant-based beer” on his Friday-night show and falsely claimed that President Joe Biden’s climate plan would require Americans to give up meat.

“Get this: America has to stop eating meat, stop eating poultry, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats,” Kudlow said. “OK, you got that? No burgers on July 4. No steaks on the barbie. I’m sure middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?

“So get ready: You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4 green,” Kudlow said.

“Now, I’m making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thinking is stupid,” he added. “It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don’t care one whit about America’s well-being. Not one whit.”

None of his claims are true.

Yes, you can grill Brussels sprouts. They’re quite good.

The big news for him is that all beer is plant- (and fungi-) based. A meat-based beer sounds remarkably unpleasant. If Larry and Kid Rock want to try it, though, I wouldn’t stop them.

Larry Kudlow is a lying moron…a typical Republican, I guess. He said this two years ago — has anyone seen any hint of a steak ban?

Reminder: Atheists exposed!

We’re having this conversation tomorrow.

One thing the other participants are welcoming is opening the comments to critics and serious questioners — if you want to disagree (politely!) with a gang of atheists, or dissent vigorously, or promote your goofy beliefs, go ahead. Bring it up in the YouTube chat. We’ll make some time to address those kinds of comments and questions.

Don’t be chicken. You can bravely march into the snake pit of atheists/evolutionists and get bragging rights by surviving.

We don’t have beach reading in the Midwest, lacking in oceans

Since FDotM mentioned how social media can cut into your book-reading time, I thought I’d say that for me, it isn’t true. I can read a book any time I want, and I do. It is my custom to read for an hour before bed, or sometimes over lunch, and I chew through books pretty fast.

Sometimes I pick up trash reads. The latest was one called Pistols: A Deep Sea Thriller (hint: you know it’s going to be a throw-away when they need to include the genre in the title; sometimes you can just look at the cover). It’s totally ridiculous. It’s about stomatopods that are exposed to toxic waste and swim around, snipping people in half and cooking them with high intensity sonic bursts. My favorite part was when the scientist character has to explain why they also have toxic slime, and starts babbling about ubiquitination, before he has done any kind of analysis of tissue, or even seen one of the monsters. Cheesy, but sometimes you need something silly.

I’ve also been on a Madeline Miller kick lately, and that’s definitely not cheesy trash. I recently re-read The Song of Achilles, which was magnificent and nearly made me cry. Circe is also really, really good and well worth your while. I’m going on a collecting trip in the old Lake Agassiz lands up north this weekend, and picked up her short story, Galatea for those moments when I’m not chasing spiders.

See? Being an internet nerd is not incompatible with actively reading for entertainment.

Go ahead. Prove your bookworm cred by telling me all the stuff you read for fun. Don’t be shy, and admit to your popcorn reading as well as your high-brow stuff.