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.

Is it Halloween already?

Bats and spiders…it makes me think of Halloween, anyway. I’ll stick a photo below the fold of a spider eating a bat so you can get into the festive spirit, too.

It seems there is a bit of a conflict going on in northern Australia, with bats snatching up spiders and spiders snaring bats.

Ms Maclean said there had been several other recorded incidents of bats caught in spider webs but, conversely, some microbats in the Far North were known to eat golden orb spiders out of their webs.

“[Golden-tipped bats] have two large teeth that are specially housed in the bottom jaw,” she said.

“They can tell which side of the web the spider’s in, they fly in, they grab the body of the spider with the teeth, and then they fly backwards out of the web with it.

“They kind of suck the contents of the abdomen out … they don’t particularly eat the legs and things.”

I don’t feel at all bad if a bat occasionally meets a grisly end.

[Read more…]

It’s called a bribe

It’s pretty simple, actually. Right-wingers have been bribing Clarence Thomas for years.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Harlan Crow has been celebrating this with his bought-and-paid for super-realistic art. It’s all the same small circle of cronies and their apologists.

It’s like a crime family. Charming.

One more day, I think

I’ve got a committee meeting coming up at 8am, and then I’m closeting myself in the office for the day to hammer out two final exams. Once I get that done, all my heavy responsibilities vanish until the end of next week, when those exams come back and I have to grade them.

I can do this. One big push, and then it’s a summer of spiders.

The corruption is just oozing out

No one is done with Clarence Thomas. He has another channel for his bribery stream.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

I was dismayed by the first sentence of the second paragraph. People are paying $6000/month for a boarding school? That’s nuts. I could never afford that kind of payout, nor could most people. This must be how “trickle down economics” works — the people with many millions of dollars subsidize the lifestyle of people who run over-priced private boarding schools.

Also, “raising him as a son” apparently means “shipping the kid off to a school where we won’t have to see him for nine months of the year.”

Worse, in this case, is that Thomas has a billionaire sugar daddy paying the bills, and Thomas knew this was an ethical problem, because he kept it secret.

Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.

Not clear? Crystal clear. He knew this was shady and was feebly trying to hide it.

Oh, hey, remember Herschel Walker, one of the dumbest Republican candidates ever (he lost)? He’s also in the news.

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Wow. I wish I had a friend I could call up on the phone and ask for half a million dollars that I’d never have to pay back. Well, I do have such friends, I’m sure — maybe I’ll call you up and ask you for a hundred thousand dollars sometime — it’s just that none of my friends have that kind of money, and definitely none of the kind who would give me that much. (I do have a Patreon account, but I only ask for $1-$5, and am deeply grateful for those donations. If any of you want to send me $500K, though, we’d finally be able to do that complete update of the Freethoughtblogs code, and several other things…).

Unfortunately, I’m not a Republican, and also haven’t had my conscience drilled out of my skull, so that’s not going to happen.

“That’s not how white men fight”

One of the texts that led to Tucker Carlson’s firing has been revealed. It’s surprising.

“That’s not how white men fight”

It’s not surprising because it’s a mild statement — it’s not. It’s deeply, implicitly racist. What’s surprising is that Fox News executives cared. Racism is what Fox News does. It’s just that Carlson plainly spoke out the words of white supremacy, and they knew this was going to be news…even if the Fox News audience would have agreed with the sentiment, and even now are probably looking at each other quizzically, wondering what’s wrong with the comment.

Me, I’m just wondering…how do white men fight? Have I been doing it wrong?

I think the way we’re supposed to do it is take advantage of any good fortune to oppress other people, make them weaker, and then exploit the hell out of them. Then there’s all the lying and cheating and stealing we do to maintain any advantage, all while declaiming that we are obviously superior and meritorious because we’ve got our boot on your neck and aren’t going to let you up. Yeah, that’s how white men fight. Then we live in terror that someone else might manage to do the same thing to us.