Starship post-mortem

After the biggest rocket in the world exploded shortly after launch, it’s time to figure out what went wrong. Mark Sumner provides the long detailed analysis, while Scott Manley gives us a video.

I’m not a space guy or engineer, but here’s my shorter summary: an important piece of the starship technology was the launch pad, or Stage 0. The rocket was so powerful that it destroyed Stage 0, sending massive lumps of concrete flying everywhere that smashed the engines. You’d think that the engineers would have been aware of these potential dangers, but someone decided they didn’t need flame diverters or water cooling jets. That someone was Elon Musk himself.

Even shorter summary: Elon Musk’s incompetence blew it up.

Now I really want to look on the bright side, so I have a suggestion. Elon Musk really likes money, so he should sell tickets for the next flight — big money tickets that only billionaires could afford. Promise them a grand party in space, with Elon Musk at the helm to show that he’s confident it’ll work. Pack it with a dozen billionaires as passengers. Then launch it. I’ll cheer the entire duration of its flight, and cheer even louder at the end.

It could be a glorious Billionaire Disposal System, but don’t call it that. Don’t want to tip them off.

What are we going to do about Missouri?

For one thing, we have to deal with the rise of Missouri Man, rival to the ubiquitous Florida Man.

On April 18, Republic Police Department officers were called to a Price Cutter to respond to a call about a robbery in which a man held an employee at gunpoint so that he would be served meat.

Larry Gene Gay, 70, of Springfield, is charged with one felony count of unlawful use of a weapon and a felony count of armed criminal action.

Court documents show that officers responded to the scene and ordered Gay to get out of his truck so they could arrest him. After he was taken into custody, an officer removed a loaded semi-automatic pistol with a bullet in the chamber from Gay’s hip holster.

In an interview, Gay said he went to Price Cutter to buy steaks. He told the “good man” who was helping him that they needed to weigh the steaks. However, the meat department was closed. Gay said at that point, he showed his gun “Just to say I’m not stealing. I need you here to help me to get a couple of these steaks. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The officer asked Gay why he thought the people in the store called police and told them he was threatening them with his gun.

“I don’t know,” Gay said in the interview. “I have no idea.”

Hand stupid people a gun, and at some point they’re going to use it to deal with some minor inconvenience. Missouri has a lot of guns, and a lot of stupid people, it’s an inevitable problem. But we could wave that away, it’s a problem with a few individuals, I’ve met a lot of good people in Missouri, and we can’t blame the whole state.

Here’s wider problem, though. Missouri is run by a gang of regressive Republicans who have been passing all kinds of ugly laws. They hate transgender kids, you know, and want to deny them good healthcare. The state Attorney General, Andrew Bailey, set up a ‘snitch line’ where random concerned citizens could submit their complaints about those danged transes and their wicked doctors who poison them all with estrogen and testosterone. It’s not clear what Bailey was going to do with those complaints…arrest everyone who was androgynous? Send out genital inspectors to check the accused? It was the usual preliminaries, I suspect, where the fascist builds a list in anticipation of the day he can send out the brownshirts.

It didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.

Bailey said his office set up the tip line for parents to submit concerns about the gender-affirming care their children received from transgender youth centers. He also issued an emergency rule severely restricting access to gender-affirming care.

PROMO, a Missouri LGBTQ advocacy organization, said Bailey “fanned the flames of hate” in issuing the emergency rule.

“The Attorney General’s claims are maliciously cherry-picked and come from unverified sources that allow him to promulgate disgusting, obstructive, and misleading information into an emergency rule,” PROMO said in a statement. “It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the real threat to Missourians is the attorney general himself.”

Social media users on TikTok, Twitter and Tumblr ensured that Bailey’s office would have plenty of evidence to sift through for the investigation, flooding the site with fake complaints and other ephemera.

When the online form first launched, it lacked a CAPTCHA, which savvy Twitter users quickly used to their advantage by using bots to spam the site. Users also employed a generator to churn out fake names and fake Missouri addresses. Others just dumped text into the complaint form, ranging from the entire script of the “Bee Movie,” to Billy May’s OxiClean sales pitch, to Walter White’s introductory monologue in “Breaking Bad.” TikTok users said they submitted the “most raunchiest fanfic from AO3” and “a saucy love story of Mario and Luigi.”

Love wins in the end, right?

But here’s my dilemma. I’m a regular tourist visiting Missouri — I go for Skepticon every summer. The question I wrestle with is…should I refuse to go again, and not contribute my travel dollars to a fascist, theocratic state? Or should I go, and contribute my travel dollars to the good kinds of Missourians who support a liberal skeptical conference? I’ve got time to resolve this internal debate since the organizers haven’t even announced a date for the event.

They could fix my problem for me by moving the whole Skepticon show north, to a progressive state (not Iowa), but that leaves the good Missourians in the lurch. I dislike these kinds of decisions. My problem would go away if Missouri would just throw the rascals out, but that isn’t going to happen this year, or maybe even in years to come.

Republicans ignore the principles of a good education — clearly, they never had one

Every time they try to hide an ugly fact of history, they look worse — they’re just compounding the problem. We’re seeing this mistake in Florida and Texas and Tennessee, where Republican legislatures cobble up laws to silence teachers and prevent them from mentioning the ghastly evils that previous legislatures have executed. It’s not going to work. It just means that the next generation is going to be confronted with the fact of American slavery, for example, and the fact that America tried to hush it up in the 2020s. Tennessee has been eager to join in the shameful displays of cowardice.

Last year, Tennessee passed one of those cookie-cutter rightwing bills banning the teaching of “divisive concepts” in higher education — the very same sort of hogwash that’s currently under a court injunction in Florida. The law, SB 623 prohibited teaching a whole bunch of very bad ideas, like the concept that “One race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex” or the always fun “An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” — so you can’t read about Ruby Bridges, you. The bill also prohibited “penalizing” students for not endorsing the concepts, because we all know how professors like to demand that students recite from the Maoist catechism.

(Do follow that link to the Ruby Bridges story. There is a woman in Florida named Emily Conklin who is going to be on the poster about the wicked perpetrators of bigotry, her picture right next to the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Democrats of the 1960s, and Steve King of Iowa.)

You can tell these congressvermin know nothing about how education works — they’re of the God’s Not Dead school of projection, where they think their authoritarian vision of how to teach by law enforcement is the way we must work. For example, my genetics students have been given a bunch of papers on racist and sexist misconceptions in genetics that they’ll be summarizing in class this week…and I’ve explicitly told them that they can disagree with the papers without penalty. I can’t imagine standing up in a class and dictating how they must interpret the science. That’s not how any of this works, this is an exercise in learning how to think for themselves about the evidence.

Does that make me one of those red professors? There’s no way you can compel me to wear a bowtie.

Mighty Morphin’ Spiders

Last month, I thought I’d found a color morph in S. triangulosa: some recently caught wild spiders from Wisconsin that were almost solid black, with just a hint of the standard pattern. I figured I’d be able to do some crosses this summer and see if it was heritable.

Now I don’t need to! Look at the difference a month in the lab environment makes.

[I try not to splash spiders in your face here. You’ll have to look it up on Instagram or Patreon.]

That’s the same spider, almost a month apart. Now it looks all the other spiders I’ve got. I suspect it’s got to be something about the change in diet, from whatever they were finding in a garage to a steady diet of fruit flies and mealworms.

They were caught in Wisconsin, where they’d been living on cheese curds, brats, and La Croix, probably.

Also note that this spider has made a couple of egg sacs. The one in the top right is a half-assed mess, only a few eggs only partially wrapped in a thin skein of silk.

Tower of Spiders

We’re currently isolating all freshly laid egg sacs and tagging them with the date so that we know exactly how old the embryos are. This week I started scanning all the adult containers and setting aside those who had produced an egg sac.

It started out well: one on Sunday, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday, and I’m thinking this is perfect — a fresh batch of 30+ embryos every other day is what we can handle easily. Then then this morning, Friday, I come in and…5 new egg sacs for 21 April.

Then I realize…Thursday is quarter taps night at the Met Lounge downtown. Have they been sneaking out for a wild party night, and then coming back to the lab all primed for reproduction? That’s the only rational explanation.

I could be concerned that I’m going to be in another situation where the lab is drowning in more spiders than we know what to do with, but we’re about to switch paradigms a little bit. Next week we start plunking lots of embryos into fixative, then the week after we start doing embryo dissections and staining with propidium iodide. None of these spiders are going to live to adulthood. Sorry.

I was wondering what that stench was

I have been informed that the Slymepit is dead. The Slymepit was an online forum that was set up in the wake of Elevatorgate, when a small group of atheists decided to set up a base from which to hurl racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at Social Justice Warriors like Rebecca Watson, Stephanie Zvan, Jey McCreight, and many others, including me. It was one of the uglier sides of the internet, although its fans viewed it differently.

The Slymepit, a long-running atheist discussion board heavily involved in the A/S activism ‘Schism’, is shutting its doors after a ten-year run. Creator and host, ‘Lsuoma’, decided that the conversation, often humorous, insightful, and informative, but also at times pugnacious, scurrilous, or garrulous, had strayed too far from the site’s original purpose of “exposing the stupidity, lies, and hypocrisy of Social Justice Warriors.” Live commenting has therefore been shut down, with ten years of comments and user-created artwork archived.

(If you’d like to see examples of the Slymepit’s creativity, RationalWiki has you covered.)

OK, fine, you get to elide over the Slymepit’s many sins during its funeral. Goodbye, you won’t be missed.

Although I’m immensely amused by this comment:

The Pit’s greatest strength was always that it never took itself seriously. That really frustrated those who so fervently hated and obsessed over us.

Dude. The pit was frenetically abusive, regularly focused howling obscenities at individuals who dared to think social justice was an important cause, and took itself painfully seriously. You were on a mission to destroy people.

As for the “obsession” part — your little clubhouse of haters rotted out and collapsed six months ago, and no one, other than your fellow bigots, even noticed until now.

If anyone wants to find the Slymepit gang today, they’re usually hanging out on Jerry Coyne’s blog.

Groomers for Christ in Texas

The Texas senate approved this bill.

S.B. 1515 would require Texas public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. At present, Texas public schools have no such requirement, and this legislation only became legally feasible with the United States Supreme Court’s opinion last year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 142 S. Ct. 2407 (2022), which overturned the Lemon test under the Establishment Clause (found in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)) and instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition.

That’s not all!

The Senate also gave final passage to Senate Bill 1396, authored by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which would allow public and charter schools to adopt a policy requiring every campus to set aside a time for students and employees to read the Bible or other religious texts and to pray.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement that both bills are wins for religious freedom in Texas.

I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind, he said. Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back to our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans.

Somehow, forcing a sectarian version of religion on school children is now being labeled “religious freedom.”

I’m wondering how all those conservative atheists regard this development.

Elon Musk is the damned soul leading us through the social media hellscape

The Musk rat had a very bad day yesterday.

Tesla Inc. disappointed investors with its first-quarter results, sending the electric-car maker’s shares down 9.75% on Thursday to $162.99. An experimental Starship rocket designed by SpaceX achieved liftoff in Boca Chica, Texas, only to explode about four minutes later in a fiery ball above the Gulf of Mexico. And on Twitter, as Musk promised weeks ago, many users lost their legacy blue checkmarks for choosing not to pay $8 per month for the privilege.

When it comes to the billionaire’s net worth, Tesla’s sinking share price had the most immediate consequences. His wealth dropped by $12.6 billion as a result, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his biggest decline this year. His stake in Tesla, including shares and options, makes up the biggest part of his $163.9 billion fortune, though SpaceX has become more important as its valuation soars.

The stupid blue checkmark thing is all the rage on Twitter. It’s Musk’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable by charging $8 for a little blue symbol on your account, but few people are taking him up on it, and mainly they are conservative twits begging for approval from senpai. Some famous people are refusing to pay for it, which is a bad look (what good is a status symbol if high-status people reject it?), so Musk gave Lebron James, Stephen King, and Willam Shatner the blue check for free…and then the nobodies started clamoring for a free check mark, too.

His get-rich-quick scheme of selling a pointless blue logo is flopping. Oh no, quick, his capitalist brain thinks of a way to force people to buy it…I know, it said, compel your advertisers, the only people bringing in revenue, to pay for it!

What a super-genius.

At least it’s not Parler. Parler has already closed up shop, and its former employees are scrabbling for ways to open alternatives.

“Parler management are straight up f*ggots,” Dennis Harrison, whose LinkedIn identifies him as a lead engineer at the company, wrote in a private Discord server this past Sunday. “They ruined something good.”

I’m sure Dennis will find a way to express himself elsewhere. I don’t think I’ll be interested in any company he engineers, but sure, he sounds like a genius of Musk’s calibre.

“We’re getting an entity setup so we can take donations/money whatever to help with some of the costs,” the former Parler engineer wrote on the Discord channel. “Currently about $300 a month just for the dev stuff.”

“Once we start making it public, that will go up to $500 a month, I bet,” he continued.

Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes on social media, here’s another: Align Us, an app that lets users rate businesses on a conservative to progressive scale, so you can boycott them. I’m not at all interested — I know that all businesses are pro-business, so what more information do I need? — and I also don’t believe in the companies claim of neutrality.

In the wake of “Go Woke, Go Broke”, consumers are feeling highly motivated that they can make a difference in society simply by where they spend (or don’t spend) their hard-earned money. They want to know that when they support a business, that business isn’t going to spend it with organizations or give money as political donations to an agenda that goes against their values.

The site has a number of advertisers — they all seem to be niche conservative weirdos, like Mammoth Nation (totally a grift) and Law Enforcement Today. It’s also badly coded, frequently popping up an alert to tell you it’s struggling, along with quotes from people like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell, and then not being able to find any business near you and instead handing you a link to a random review of a company in Chicago. Did you know that Frito-Lay Inc. is liberal? Put those corn chips back on the shelf.

I’m learning that “Go Woke, Go Broke” is not a thing. It is obvious that putting right-wing ideologues in charge of anything, whether it’s the Supreme Court of a website, leads to catastrophic failure.

Since when is America fair?

It’s heart-wrenching what various states are doing to trans people, especially young trans people. Missouri, you suck.

Also, Texas, you suck. Florida, you suck. Tennessee, you suck. I could go on with this list, but basically, if any state has a Republican legislature or governor, it is a cesspool of cruelty. Stop electing those people, OK?