Whatever happened to Dr Oz?

That’s a question nobody bothered to ask, until now. Oz lost hard to Fetterman in his senate campaign, and turned himself into a standing joke with his bizarrely out-of-touch efforts to find common ground with Pennsylvanians, despite being from New Jersey. So what is he up to now? He seems to have abandoned Pennsylvania and any political aspirations, and is trying to resume his medical grift.

In running a polarizing political campaign, Oz risked all of that. Now, it appears he’s trying to get it back.

Indeed, after the election, reports emerged that Oz attempted to restart his daytime show, which ended in January 2022, before he kicked off his Senate bid. But his jaunt into politics soiled his marketability with a mainstream audience.

Perhaps more importantly, his Senate run entailed months of scrutiny from the press, and Oz’s opponents, dissecting his more dubious medical claims and business practices, tarnishing his reputation further.

All 13 seasons of his show were also produced by Winfrey’s Harpo Productions. Winfrey endorsed Fetterman in November.

He’s still a big joke, and his social media presence is permanently stained.

But even as Oz attempts to pivot back into the medical personality that built his fortune, onlookers aren’t always so receptive. While he still boasts fans in the comment sections who’ve lauded his semi-return to public life, many are still trolling the once-candidate with the same jokes that hung over his Senate run.

None of that will hurt his money-making con, though. He’s spending a lot of time in Florida nowadays, where he can fleece the MAGA sheep. One of the goals of the pseudoscience scam is to identify a ripe crop of gullible rubes, and his campaign did successfully accomplish that.

I predicted this

The president of the University of Minnesota, Joan Gabel, has decided to leave her $700,000/year position to get paid even more somewhere else. And no one wept.

However, now we begin the dance to hire a new overpaid administrator, and the first step is to hire an interim president for a year or so while we spend a lot of money wooing someone new. The Board of Regents presented us with a list of candidates, and I looked over that list with a cynical eye for the worst possible candidate, and predicted which one the regents would pick. Of course I was dead on.

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents on Monday picked former Hormel Foods CEO Jeff Ettinger to serve as interim president.

Ettinger is expected lead the U on a temporary basis while the Board of Regents searches for a new permanent president. The board looked for candidates for an interim who would not seek the position permanently.

Ten of the 12 board members voted for Ettinger, including Regent Mary Davenport.

“Ettinger is somebody from the outside, from a different point of view, a different walk in life who comes into higher education with some base knowledge, but brings something bigger,” Davenport said.

How could I know this was coming? Because I know our regents, and I just scanned the list for the businessman with no personal knowledge of academia.

Ettinger, who has a law degree, had the least amount of academic experience of the four finalists.

He told the board that his experience leading Hormel will translate well to the university.

Right. Hormel. The company that churns out processed meat, like Spam. Just like the university churns out meat for capitalism?

We’ll be rid of him soon enough, but we’re going to continue to be saddled with this inappropriate Board of Regents forever, and they’re going to pick the next president.

Maybe I’m being unfair. We just got a letter from the president of the board of regents, further explaining his background and experience.

Previously, he was the chief executive officer of the Hormel Foods Corporation in Austin, MN from 2005 to 2016. He ascended to CEO after 16 years with the company in roles including corporate attorney, treasurer and president of Jennie-O Turkey Store, Inc. in Willmar, MN.

Oh. President of the Jennie-O Turkey Store, you say? Eminently qualified to run an academic institution then.

A walk in the wetlands

Last night, Mary and I went for a bit of a hike at the Wetlands Management Office — they have a trail through a big chunk of very soggy land, full of ducks.

(Yes, that’s what the untilled prairie grasslands look like this time of year.)

It does look a bit brown, but spring just started. Give it time. We did find some prairie pasqueflowers, the first flowers of the season.

We also found spiders, of course, but maybe I’ll throw a few of those photos in a separate article on Patreon, so this one can be spider-free.

Let’s pretend humans are single-celled organisms

I’ve noticed a strange new dogma: sex is defined by the size of your gametes. You’re either making big ones or little ones (or none at all, but let’s ignore that, because we’re trying to invent a binary distinction), and some people plop down some simplistic claim, like that “women produce large gametes,” as if it is definitive and absolute. Other people are noticing this phenomenon.

There are those, politicians, pundits and even a few scientists, who maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex. They assert that men and women are defined by their production of these gamete cells, making them a distinct biological binary pair, and that our legal rights and social possibilities should flow from this divide. Men are men. Women are women. Simple.

It’s stupid. It’s the new arbitrary definition to replace the Y chromosome excuse, and it’s got all the failings of any attempt to reduce a complex biological process to a single phrase.

For humans, sex is dynamic, biological, cultural and enmeshed in feedback cycles with our environments, ecologies and multiple physiological and social processes.

So when someone states that “An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing” and argues that legal and social policy should be “rooted in properties of bodies,” they are not really talking about gametes and sex biology. They are arguing for a specific political, and discriminatory, definition of what is “natural” and “right” for humans based on a false representation of biology. Over the past few centuries this process of misrepresentation of biology was, and still is, used to deny women rights and to justify legal and societal misogyny and inequity, to justify slavery, racialization, racism and to enforce multiple forms of discrimination and bias. Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.

It’s embarrassing that there are actual scientists, biologists even, who dismiss all the complexity of post-zygotic development to shrink people down to nothing more than their gametes. It’s the new fad, though. We’re just going to have to wait this out as the bigots adopt yet another arbitrary definition to rationalize their weird-ass idiotic biases.

Let’s see the logical conclusion of this nonsense.

You may say that’s incredibly stupid, but mark my words: the people who want to control women’s reproduction and legislate sexuality are nodding along and thinking that’s a really useful point.

Minnesota is feeling increasingly special

I don’t know how people can stand to live in some of those other states — you know, the Republican states. Some people can’t, and they’re starting to leave places like Texas to move to colder but more welcoming states like ours.

The family moved 1,200 miles to St. Paul last summer after Texas took steps to limit pediatric access to gender-affirming care and investigate parents who sought it for transgender children.

“It got very bad, very quickly,” she said.

Advocates expect more families to move to Minnesota, which has positioned itself as a refuge while other states have restricted access by transgender people to bathrooms, sports teams and medical care. Minnesota, under its new “shield law,” won’t support any state’s prosecution of parents or doctors providing gender-affirming care for children.

They’re coming to us from the usual suspects…Texas, Florida.

A Florida dad limited his search to six states with shield laws and job prospects after deciding that his home state had become hostile to his 8-year-old transgender boy.

“The rhetoric started to ramp up and we could envision a time that we needed to move and decided to be proactive,” said the father, Daniel, who moved to St. Paul. He spoke on condition that only his first name be published, because his wife and children are finishing the school year in Miami.

If you’re interested in escaping your local hell hole, Transforming Families Minnesota seems to be one place you can contact. They also have a useful list of resources.

It’s going to get crowded if everyone moves here, though. A better solution would be for everyone’s state to kick the haters out of power and make your own local Minnesota. Until that miracle occurs, though, please do move North. You make this place even better.

Haw haw haw

Ken Ham was asked if Muslims are going to hell. His answer:

Well, it doesn’t matter if one is a Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Muslim, Methodist, Hindu, Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or any other denomination or religious group—if a person has not repented of sin and received the free gift of salvation offered through the Lord Jesus Christ (being “born again”), they will be separated from God for eternity in a place the Bible calls hell. And sadly, the majority of people will go there as Jesus warned, ‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13).

Shorter Ken Ham: yes.

It is all out of my hands now

My exams look nothing like this. I must be doing them wrong.

I’ve been giving open book, open notes, online exams with no proctors, no timing, nothin’ but “here’s some questions, have fun answering them” for the last few years, prompted in part by the pandemic. I like it this way. It de-emphasizes rote memorization and requires them to understand the concepts (it also requires me to ask questions that can’t be answered with a recitation or regurgitation.) I also encourage them to study together and collaborate on figuring it all out — although they are required to write answers in their own words, no copying and pasting.

Anyway, all of my final exams are now written and posted to our Canvas site, and I have nothing more to do. Until Friday at 6pm, that is, when all these exams come winging back to me, demanding my immediate attention.

I think I’ll go for a walk.

Will not achieve today’s goals

I had planned to get both of my finals written today, but only finished the one for introductory biology. Even at that, it was frustrating: I had a set length to reach, a reasonable number of questions, and I had so many I had to cut them back by half. Alternatively, I could have thrown lengthy essay questions at them that were worth only a half point each. I’m not that cruel.

The genetics final will have to wait until tomorrow morning, because it’s only 4pm and my brain is worn out.

Sorry, genetics students. You weren’t in a hurry for this, were you?

The end of a stressalicious semester

Today is officially the last day of instruction, but there won’t be much instruction going on — it’s all administrative stuff for me, acquainting students with the record of their past performance, pointing at the specter of the imminent final exam like a ghost of Christmases yet to be, polishing up that final exam and posting it for them to procrastinate and worry over, the usual bad time at the end of a difficult school year.

Next year will be better, right?

It could be worse. Look at these spider photoreceptors!

It turns out that if spiders aren’t properly fed, their photoreceptors start to die off.

Researchers looked at the bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax), a common species that relies very much on light-sensitive photoreceptors in its large eyes to spot prey. When the spiders don’t get enough nutrients, these photoreceptors can be lost.

“Photoreceptors are energetically costly,” says biologist Elke Buschbeck from the University of Cincinnati. “It’s hard to keep up with their energy needs.”

“If you deprive them of nutrition, the system fails. It’s the functional equivalent of the macula in our eyes.”

See, if I don’t have enough research time to take care of my spider colony, they might go blind. I’ll run that by the administration and see if I can get a reduction in teaching load.*

*Note: it will not work.

Blatant both-siderism from a physicist

A lot of people have been asking me to comment on a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder. I knew who she is — she is a science communicator who specializes in physics, and I’ve seen a few of her videos. They were OK, not particularly interesting to me, just because I’m on the biology side of the spectrum. Great, though, more people talking about science is a net positive.

But then she did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

I took a look. I only made it 34 seconds into the video before I closed it and said, “Fuck this.” This is how she opens:

On the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate innocent children. On the other side there are those saying it’s saving the lives of minorities who have been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people like you and I who think both sides are crazy and could someone summarize the facts in simple words, which is what I am here for.

I am done. I’ll never be able to watch another of her videos. You’d think a physicist would at least understand logic, but there’s the fallacy of the false dilemma coupled to a bad case of physicist’s arrogance. It’s both-siderism with a vengeance. She claims to be all about No hype, no spin, but she just made a false equivalence between people who are trying to legislate invasive, destructive meddling in people’s lives, and people who want to be left alone to live their lives without interference, and calls both of them crazy. That she thinks the right to live a life without being tortured by religious fanatics is crazy is most definitely taking a side and putting a fierce spin on her opinion.

Goodbye, Sabine.

And sorry to everyone who wanted me to comment on the rest of her ideas. There’s 27 more minutes of that crap and I just couldn’t bear to continue. I’m cis, and I have no idea how trans people can persist in a society where that kind of nonsense gets served up at you constantly.

While I’m weak and unable to stomach such stupidity, at least Rebecca Watson, the Iron Skeptic, managed to cope. Here’s her take on Hossenfelder.

Yeah, what she said. One the one side you have people who listen to a half-minute of Sabine Hossenfelder and then flip the table, and on the other side there are those who can hear her out and then run circles around her.