How to make the medical establishment very angry

Just publish the truth about their history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, medical schools embraced a white supremacist belief in black inferiority and subhumanness. Racism was a social sport upper-class men played to solidify a professional identity rooted in whiteness (figure 1). These heinous ‘educational’ activities included torturing enslaved black people with ‘experiments’, graverobbing their bodies from cemeteries and attempting to detect whether they were faking illness while torturing them as ‘treatment’ (Willoughby 2016). This white supremacy persisted long after legalised slavery ended. The 1910 Flexner Report closed five of the seven black medical schools, preventing 35 000 black physicians from graduating in subsequent decades, amidst deadly black–white health inequities (Campbell et al. 2020). The American Medical Association (AMA) sanctioned this disregard for humanity, banning black physicians from local AMA chapters through the 1960s, thereby denying licensing, board certification and hospital privileges (Baker et al. 2008). This anti-black racism was nothing new. During the early twentieth century, organised medicine cultivated a symbiotic relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, promoting its white supremacist conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality and their related violence (Antonovich 2021). White psychiatrists diagnosed black men protesting during the Civil Rights movement with a dangerous ‘protest psychosis’. Pathologising black people’s resistance to oppression while normalising white people’s violently oppressive behaviour is a long historical arc. It is reflected in diagnoses like drapetomania from the mid-nineteenth century and the overdiagnosis of conduct disorder in racially minoritised children today (Metzl 2010).

That photo is genuinely horrible and shameful. The account is true, every word, and damning. Yet the article that was from triggered outrage from medical institutions. It shouldn’t. I like this comment from Dr Brandy Schillace, about how they should respond:

That’s how we build. That’s how we have real conversation and community. There is amazing relief, Grace, growth, in admitting we are wrong AND acknowledging that the wrong has deeply hurt others. Then both apology and amendment will be genuine, and accepted as such.

Ken Ham is a disingenuous fraud on climate change

I’m sorry, I feel stupider for having read this: it’s Ken Ham talking about climate change. He reports the headlines:

Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend here in the US, headlines proclaimed: “For the third day in a row, Earth’s average temperature breaks record highs.” Last week on July 5, 2023, the average global temperature (according to one university’s “Climate Reanalyzer,” “a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition”) was a record 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 17.18 C), beating the “record” set on Monday. But is this really a record?

Yes.

But Ol’ Ken questions it.

…was last week really a record? Well, it might have been—but we don’t really know! Humans have only been recording climate data since the 1880s, and we’ve only had robust data since satellite data collection began in the 1970s. So we have no idea how warm the warmest day on earth was in all of the earth’s history! (But we do know, based on the fossil record, that the earth’s climate was much warmer before the flood!)

You idiot. We have over a century of robust climate records, and this was the highest temperature on record, therefore, yes, it was a record high temperature. Words mean things, you know. They weren’t saying this was the hottest the planet had ever been — that probably occurred about 4½ billion years ago, when the planet was a molten ball of rock — but the hottest since we humans have been carefully tracking the climate. OK, you fucking stupid charlatan?

But he goes on to top that disingenuous word game. He claims that he believes in climate change.

Not only do I believe in climate change, but I’m a climate change alarmist, and I do believe humans have caused climate change!

Except…just not the way scientists do, with their measurements and data and records. No, he believes in a coming Biblical catastrophe.

Well, I’m not referring to a supposed slight global temperature increase allegedly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I’m referring to the ultimate catastrophic climate change everyone should be aware of when one day in the future, Jesus will return, and the earth (and the whole universe) will be judged with fire, and God will make a new heavens and earth.

He then goes on to say that humans are the cause of this coming catastrophic climate change, because of our sin in Adam…except he then goes on to say that we’re not going to be the cause.

So, man is not going to destroy the earth! We can boldly proclaim that humans aren’t going to destroy themselves or the earth because God is in complete control, and he will determine when the ultimate catastrophic climate change will occur. So, the climate change countdown clock is absurd! We need to understand and believe in climate alarmism in a biblical context.

This is a bait-and-switch game AiG plays all the time. They have multiple articles with titles like Science Confirms Climate Change and The Globe Is Warming, But It’s Not Your Fault! and I’m a Climate Change Alarmist! that, when you actually read them, are denying all the scientific evidence in order to claim that the basis of their belief rests entirely on Bible prophecy, and that, of course, the way to prepare for climate change is to pray and go to church and give Answers in Genesis your money. The only reason you should worry about environmental catastrophe is if you don’t fear God.

Lord, I despise these liars.

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1: A surfeit of colons

I saw this dog’s breakfast of a movie last night. Hated it.

  • It’s got a macguffin, a cruciform key that somehow will give the person who uses it control of an AI that can crack all of the intelligence agencies in the world. It does nothing in this movie. It’s just a small metal object that everyone has to chase, endlessly.

  • It has the most boring villain ever. A handsome man named Gabriel who, apparently at the behest of the AI, appears to stand handsomely in the middle of the action, doing pretty much nothing, except it turns out he’s a great knife-fighter in one scene.

  • There are car chases. They’re pointless exercises in chasing — they’re only motivated by the fact that someone has the macguffin, and someone else wants it. You want car chases? Go watch Baby Driver, which does them well and integrates them into the story.

  • There is a fight scene on top of a runaway train. Of course there is.

  • Ving Rhames is the stereotypical movie hacker. He doesn’t do anything but make portentous statements and announce that he’s going to hack a computer. He wiggles his fingers magically. Don’t worry, no one involved in writing this movie understands computers or hacking or AI.

  • Oh my god, the writing. It’s terrible. For instance, there’s a scene where a room full of intelligence bureaucrats who are reciting a summary of the problem. The thing is, it’s a series of sentences, and the individuals go around the room with each one saying one sentence in turn. People don’t talk that way. There are multiple scenes where the dialog is clumsy and unrealistic.

  • There is a stupid scene where Simon Pegg is sent on a side-quest to neutralize a tiny nuclear bomb. It turns out to be a puzzle game, with riddles. It’s like something you’d find in a video game. And then it turns out to be a fake bomb. The whole scene could have been cut without affecting the movie at all, except that they needed to give Pegg something to do.

  • The masks. I hate the fucking stupid masks, and the obligatory scene where a character pulls off a thick rubbery latex mask to reveal that he was some other character. Masks can’t do that, they’ll fool no one, but it’s a thing in these movies.

  • Tom Cruise, running. Running, running, running. He never arrives at a fight out of breath, though.

  • There are stunts done for the sake of being stunts. The stupid mask machine burnt out, so Tom Cruise can’t just disguise himself and walk onto a train, he instead chooses to jump off a mountain in a motorcycle and parachute into the moving train. Yeah, much more subtle and sneaky. No one will notice.

  • It is two hours and forty three minutes long, and it’s just part one.

  • In the next movie, they already have the macguffin part one, so macguffin part two will be a sunken submarine beneath the arctic ice cap, where the AI exists. I don’t care.

The best thing about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 1 is that it cured me of any desire to see Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2. Too late. It’s going to make a derailed train car falling off a cliff full of money.

The George Floyd murder only exposed a deeper rot in Minnesota

The Minneapolis Police Department has received some, shall we say, rather negative press for a series of ugly incidents — not just the George Floyd murder, but also other outrages. So the United States Department of Justice carried out an investigation. The results have been released in a 92 page document. It’s not pretty. Here is the summary of the major conclusions.

FINDINGS
The Department of Justice has reasonable cause to believe that the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law:

  • MPD uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force and other types of force.
  • MPD unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people in its enforcement activities.
  • MPD violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech.
  • MPD and the City discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls for assistance.

We like to think that Minnesota is a pretty good place to live — good schools, progressive politics, relatively good cost of living, etc., etc., etc. — but that only applies if you’re white. The report also documents some of our deeper problems.

Not everyone in Minneapolis shares in its prosperity. The metropolitan area that includes Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul—known as the Twin Cities—has some of the nation’s starkest racial disparities on economic measures, including income, homeownership, poverty, unemployment, and educational attainment. By nearly all of these measures, the typical white family in the Twin Cities is doing better than the national average for white families, and the typical Black family in the Twin Cities is doing worse than the national average or Black families. The median Black family in the Twin Cities earns just 44% as much as the median white family, and the poverty rate among Black households is nearly five times higher than the rate among white households. Of the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan areas, only one has a larger gap between Black and white earnings.

In case you’re wondering how we ended up this way…

Some researchers have traced Minneapolis’ homeownership gap and other economic disparities back to the restrictive racial covenants that barred non-white people from living in many parts of Minneapolis in the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, local and federal public officials and mortgage lenders embraced racial covenants, and lenders engaged in redlining by routinely denying loans for properties in majority Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. The racially restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court sanctioned in 1926 but later ruled unenforceable in 1948, funneled the City’s growing Black population into a few small areas and laid the groundwork for enduring patterns of residential segregation.

It’s as if there is an effect of history that is harming current generations, and a deep institutional racism routinely propped up by the courts.

The Muslim fly studies are back!

Stop me if you’ve heard this before…oh wait. If you’ve read this blog before you’ve encountered this phenomenon in the past. There is a strange cottage industry among Muslim fanatics to demonstrate the infallibility of Mohammed by testing one of his weirder claims. This one:

Over a thousand years ago Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him) said “if a fly falls down on your vessel, drown it then remove it, for one of its wings has the ailment and other has the cure” narrated by Al-Bokhari. In this study 4 flies of (Musca domestica) species were collected to investigate the antibacterial and antifungal activity of their wings. The obtained result showed that all media cultivated with right wing extract were free of bacterial and fungal growth however the bacterial and fungal growth for the left wing were observed. It could be concluded that the right fly wing is considered as new revolution of antibiotic recommended for further researches to find more antibiotics from right fly wing.

That’s from an article with the ungrammatical title, Microbiological Studies on Fly Wings(Musca domestica) Where Disease and Treat. I guess the World Journal of Medical Sciences does not exercise any editorial oversight at all, and their review process is a bit of a joke. The paper itself is incredibly bad, of a quality that would earn a failing grade if it were presented as a middle school science fair project. I mean, seriously — here’s the entirety of the results section (with a bit of the introduction and methods).

Pic. (1), (2) and (3) illustrated that there were no bacterial or fungal growth in test tubes containing the right fly wing extract however there were microbial growth in 4 test tubes for left wings extract indicated by turbidity which had been confirmed by microscopical examination, the slides for the right wings extract were free for the presence of any microbe although the slides for the left ones showed presence of both bacteria (cocci and bacilli) and fungi (hyphea)

That’s it. That’s all. Do you believe any of it? It’s not just the lack of believable data, but the introduction is full of obvious nonsense.

Entomologist latest research, certify that there is very little difference between a human and a fly-heart where biggest similarity is that both have heart disease as a result of getting older. Studied flies in order to produce cardiac medications

I know what both a fly heart and a human heart look like — and no, the only similarity is in some of the molecules that initiate differentiation.

I guess the only thing we can learn here is that the World Journal of Medical Sciences is not a trustworthy source. It’s a dumping ground for bad science and is nothing but a tool for incompetent pseudoscientists to pad their résumé.

People actually think that way

I know I tend to get peevish about bad biology and reductionism and equating human beings with their gametes, but it’s a real problem.

The debate about Margot Robbie being mid or hot, whatever — ignores her important eugenic quality — she has a powerful jawline. She was designed to birth Jocks. Women have aesthetic purpose, but their main purpose is to birth the next generation.

Oh sure, she’s pretty, but her main reason for existence is to have babies, and Rægenhere can tell from her physiognomy what kind of children she’ll have. Riiight. So many things wrong with that claim.

These people actually exist.

The Trans Agenda is a conspiracy to sterilize your children!

James Lyons-Weiler is an odd duck. He started his career in bioinformatics conventionally enough, getting a PhD, following it up with post-docs, eventually getting a position at the University of Pittsburgh, and then…he succumbed to the lure of the crackpot circuit. He now wanders about the country, giving anti-vax lectures and giving his uninformed opinions about autism. He also launched a website called IPAK-EDU.org, where IPAK is short for “Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.” Yeah, he also invented an academic institute, which is his, and of which he is the sole member. He peddles online courses on various topics — you can, for instance, gain access to a series of lectures on evolutionary biology for the low, low price of $160.

He’s also notorious enough that he has a Wikipedia page. It’s short. Here’s the bulk of it.

Lyons-Weiler has made numerous false and misleading claims about COVID-19 and vaccines. United States Court of Federal Claims Special Master Christian J. Moran concluded in 2020 that Lyons-Weiler was “wholly unqualified to opine on the question of vaccine causation”; the decision related to a lawsuit in which Lyons-Weiler had testified claiming that a woman was injured as a result of the HPV vaccine.

His February 2020 claim that SARS-CoV-2 contains a genetic sequence proving that the virus was probably engineered in a laboratory was discredited by researchers and fact-checkers.

Now you know where he’s coming from: he’s a failed academic who ekes out a living by being a mouthpiece for quack ideas. He’s anti-vax, he’s got weird ideas about autism, and now, oh joy, he’s jumped on the anti-trans bandwagon. He has an essay that seems to be fairly typical for him, Evolutionary Analysis of the “Trans Agenda” as Mass Sterilization of Youth as Reproductive Spite, in which he lards a lot of nonsensical pretentious jargon around the thesis that gender-affirming care is a scheme to sterilize your children.

Please understand that this article was written to create awareness about the new reality involving the interplay between social dynamics and the way people control and influence others’ reproductive heritage. I have not seen this issue addressed by anyone because discussions about evolutionary principles and social dynamics are taboo because evil people in the past twisted Darwin’s understanding of evolution toward their own advantage in ways that led to mass forced sterilization. I am issuing this article as a warning of the hidden dangers of de facto state-sponsored sterilization programs being implemented by certain states within the United States embedded in the Trans Agenda.

The evolutionary principles and social dynamics he’s talking around are the ideas of eugenics and the extermination of undesirable individuals. Yeah, it’s taboo, and he is the brave truth-teller who is going to expose the Trans Agenda as the same thing. He’s going to explain Haldane and Hamilton and Maynard Smith to back up his argument that gender affirming care is a nefarious plot, and he’s going to cite animal examples as evidence (bonus points for mentioning spiders).

Some female spiders may consume their own offspring. This is known as “filial cannibalism”, is seen in many species of fish that brood their live young, and is a form of reproductive spite. This behavior can be driven by a lack of resources or as a strategy to gain additional nutrients for the female, thereby increasing her chances of surviving and reproducing again, thus maximizing the mother’s, but not necessarily the eaten young’s, lifetime reproductive success.

In some insects, males deposit substances in the female reproductive tract that harm or kill the spermatozoa of previous mates. This approach to sperm competition helps ensure that their own spermatozoa have a higher chance of fertilizing the eggs and increases their reproductive success. While spermatozoa are not live, this feature of competition via spite is thought to be the explanation for the shape of the human penis.

Hang on there. He defines his term, Reproductive spite refers to the phenomenon where an individual’s reproductive behavior negatively affects the survival or reproductive output of other individuals, but the spider example is not relevant. The spider is optimizing its opportunities for reproduction by recycling its own progeny, not that of others. The insect example is just mundane, familiar sperm competition — it’s only affecting the reproduction of others in the sense that if a female is bearing the male’s children, she isn’t available to bear someone else’s. This is just weird. It’s like he doesn’t understand his own argument.

Then this is a surprise: spermatozoa are not live. What biologist would make that claim? Of course they’re alive! Also, that claim about the shape of the human penis is weak, supported only by some crude modeling studies, and has not been demonstrated to be functional.

And did you know that some kinds of gender modification (but not all) lead to sterilization? No trans person ever thought of that, I guess.

In the current Trans Agenda, in which gender modification surgeries are advocated for minors as “affirming care”, a dark link exists: gender modification surgery often leads to sterilization of those individuals as a side effect.

Again, if I choose not to have children, voluntarily and of my own free will, that is not “reproductive spite.” If a man chooses to get a vasectomy, you cannot argue that that is an example of the taboo subject of eugenics. Human beings are not obligated to bear children! Also, it is not your duty to have children for your parents’ sake.

The strongly negative reaction of parents to news that some state governments – and some in powerful positions in the US Federal Government – want to allow minors to choose gender reassignment surgery – even over the objections of their parents – is understandable from a rational, scientific point of view.

No, it is not. It is understandable from a narrow, utilitarian point of view that sees individuals as having one single task, the direct production of offspring. We are social animals, and the ability of individuals to specialize and fill other roles is advantageous to the population as a whole. Remember, please, that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals.

Evolution is also not a conspiracy theory, but Lyons-Weilers seems to see everything as a conspiracy theory.

…I am not saying I have evidence the connections are intentional, but I am saying: Screw the Taboo. We owe it to our children and our collective future to ask these questions and to use Science to find the answers.

There are other areas in which social pressure is used to try to coerce or force parents to put their children in harm’s way for the potential benefit of other children. Social psychologists who are deeply schooled in evolutionary principles should look into the potential role that the vestiges of reproductive spite may play in promoting tolerance of, or even the promotion of increased risk for harm to other peoples’ children in the area of vaccine mandates.

Right. Let’s abuse “evolutionary principles” to compel children to believe that having babies is their destiny. And oh, look, there’s the crackpot anti-vaccine nonsense! Getting vaccinated reduces harm, that’s the whole point of vaccines, so you don’t get to use that as an example of people trying to reduce the competition.

But then, this is a kook who sees trans people as an example of Mass murder, mass sterilization, just like he sees vaccines as a strategy for poisoning the other members of the population.

Dawkins embarrasses himself again

Oh no, Richard Dawkins, stop. He’s asked in an interview what he thinks of doctors being arrested for gender affirming care, and his old eloquence is completely gone. He stutters, he stammers, he struggles to get an answer out, and he looks for an excuse to evade the question — for adults, he asks, or children. Like it makes a difference, like there’s an age that justifies suffering. He finally gets out…

I would have strong objections to doctors injecting minors, children, or performing surgery on them to change their sex

Note that this does not answer the question. Should doctors be jailed for providing gender-affirming care? I don’t care if someone has opinions and objects, the question is whether it is right for the state to arrest care-givers for giving care?

OK, so he doesn’t think children should be treated for this issue — not that they’re getting sex change operations anyway, they might at best be given therapy and reversible puberty blockers. What about adults?

If they’ve thought about it properly

As if trans people don’t even think long and hard about it, and as if he’s the right person to judge if they’ve properly thought about it. He goes on to say that it might be OK if if they struggle and suffer over it. You can be trans, according to Dawkins, if you’ve been made sufficiently miserable.

What we’re seeing now is a fashion, a craze, mimetic epidemic which is spreading like an epidemic of measles or something like that

Oh, just go ahead and spit out the words woke mind virus, it’s what you really want to say, boomer.

That doesn’t even make sense. Is measles a meme now? Is it really a good idea to compare a fashion to a serious, life threatening disease? Is the state of being trans a biological disease at all?

Dawkins really needs to learn that if he doesn’t have an informed opinion on a topic, he should refrain from answering…especially if he’s just going to regurgitate that anti-trans crap that is so popular over there on the other side of the Atlantic.

Being a good scientist might be harder than you think

You know, this guy was a terrible scientist by most criteria

The ideas in this paper, Ten simple rules for socially responsible science, ought to be explicitly spelled out in any grad program, especially since many of the incentives in science careers tend to oppose their rules. Read the whole thing, but here are a few of my comments on their list.

Rule 1: Get diverse perspectives early on

Some people seem to believe in the myth of the lone genius who comes up with brilliant ideas and executes them…and then gets a Nobel prize. It doesn’t work that way. Ever. It’s totally collaborative. In my classes I literally force students to work in teams in the lab, and there are always a few students who insist on going it alone. That’s missing the point!

Rule 2: Understand the limits of your design with regard to your claims

It’s tempting to go too far and make extravagant justifications for your work. Studying spiders will lead to a cure for cancer! Not really, but it would be a big boost to getting grant money if it were true.

Rule 3: Incorporate underlying social theory and historical contexts

I’ve experienced this unfortunate attitude that the only work that matters is stuff that’s been published in the last five years. I’ve had students ask me if it was OK to cite a paper from 1991 in their thesis project. Yeah? Why not? I cited papers from the 19th century in my PhD thesis! Dig deep, go interdisciplinary, drink from the Pierian spring, it’ll make your work better.

Rule 4: Be transparent about your hypothesis and analyses

Obviously. An experiment is not a fishing expedition.

Rule 5: Report your results and limitations accurately and transparently

Uh-oh. It’s shocking that we have to spell that out.

Rule 6: Choose your terminology carefully

This is about jargon. I’ve written a few things where I’ve totally lost people because they don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s also very common for me to make lots of comments in first drafts of student papers that they need to spell out that acronym and need to explain their terminology.

Rule 7: Seek a rigorous review and editorial processes

It’s common to see resentment at reviewer comments, and sometimes they are wrong…but you have to try and see it as a process to improve your work. That’s hard, though, especially if you’ve got a job that only cares about the volume of papers pumped out. Administrators do not read your work for quality.

Rule 8: Play an active role in ensuring correct interpretations of your results

That’s a good idea. Science isn’t fire-and-forget, a paper is a long-term commitment to a set of ideas that may need defending. Also, to be honest, few people will actually read your paper — your bigger audience is the people who come to your public talks or hear your interview on NPR or read the blog post summarizing it.

Rule 9: Address criticism from peers and the general public with respect

Awww, do we have to? Yes. That “peer” specifier is critical, though: I’m not going to treat creationists, anti-vaxxers, or climate change deniers kindly.

Rule 10: When all else fails, consider submitting a correction or a self-retraction

You’d have to do that less often if you heed #1, #5, #7, and #8, especially #7.

Most of the web advice I see about how to be a good scientist involves basic personal attributes: curiousity, observational skills, quantitative measurements, etc., and all that is true, but you don’t see much about all the essential aspects of being a cooperative community member. Maybe if we spent more time on that in early education we’d have fewer sociopaths.

Nah, there’s no cure.

Context vs. Content?

I sure hear a lot about science education in New Zealand, and I don’t know why. The latest is some upset about the New Zealand science curriculum. I also don’t understand why.

Science teachers are shocked that an advance version of the draft school science curriculum contains no mention of physics, chemistry or biology.

The so-called “fast draft” said science would be taught through five contexts – the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, infectious diseases and “at the cutting edge”.

It was sent to just a few teachers for their feedback ahead of its release for consultation next month, but some were so worried by the content they leaked it to their peers.

Teachers who had seen the document told RNZ they had grave concerns about it. It was embarrassing, and would lead to “appalling” declines in student achievement, they said.

One said the focus on four specific topics was likely to leave pupils bored with science by the time they reached secondary school.

But another teacher told RNZ the document presented a “massive challenge” to teachers and the critics were over-reacting.

“It’s the difference from what’s existed before and the lack of content is what’s scaring people. It’s fear of the unknown,” he said.

Okay. I contrast that with the Minnesota public school curriculum, which delineates the big three science subjects of physics, chemistry, and biology — there’s a year dedicated to each of those, a very traditional approach. But obviously, that’s too broad to be practical, and we also have a more detailed breakdown of what specifically needs to be taught within each.

The NZ schools would provide a different framework. Instead of the traditional topical breakdown, it’s centered around broader themes and questions. Is that bad? The real test is in the details of implementation. They could also have science standards that are identical to Minnesotas, for instance, but placed within an interdisciplinary program (that’s what I see in those five contexts, which are all interrelated and overlapping with physics, chemistry, and biology). It sounds like it would be hard to do well, especially in comparison to well-established curricula, but the devil is in the details, and I’m not seeing any details anywhere, as is unsurprising if this is just a leaked draft.

I guess I’m interested in the fact that three of their five categories (biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases) are so solidly built around biology, but at the same time they’re going to have to introduce a strong background in chemistry and physics to do them well. I also feel like you can’t teach those biological aspects without any general biochemistry, and there’s no biochem explicitly spelled out in the overview. It’s got to be there somewhere in the implementation details.

Also, I would object to “at the cutting edge” as far too vague. How do you teach that? What’s the point of discussing deep details if you don’t have the basic foundation?