90% of everything is junk

I read Larry Moran’s What’s in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk this week — it’s a truly excellent book, everyone should read it, and I’ll be making a more thorough review once I get a little time to breathe again. Basically, though, he makes an interdisciplinary case for the sloppiness of our genome, and it’s all that evidence that we should be giving our biology students from day one.

Anyway, I ran into a similar story online. Everything accumulates junk, from your genome to my office to Google. Cory Doctorow explains how search engines are choking in their own filth.

The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences at enormous scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing Jathan Sadowski’s “Habsburg AI”:

https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194

But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass every day? You won’t find them – but you will find a fake locksmith service that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come back to rob you):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html

Google is clearly losing the fraud/spam wars, which is pretty awful, given that they have spent billions to put every other search engine out of business. They spend $45b every year to secure exclusivity deals that prevent people from discovering or using rivals – that’s like buying a whole Twitter every year, just so they don’t have to compete:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-a-google-antitrust-case-could/

I’m thinking I should advertise Myers Spider Removal Service on Google, and then I respond to calls by showing up, collecting a few spiders, bring them back to my lab, and increase their numbers a thousand-fold, which I then return to the house in the dead of night. Then they call me again.

Hey, it’s a business model.

The comparison of Google’s junk to our genome’s junk falls apart pretty quickly, though, because your cells have mechanisms to silence the expression of garbage, while Google is instead motivated to increase expression of junk, because capitalism.

Fear of the Cat People

Years of ignoring Jerry Coyne, a record ruined by the fact that I felt obligated to find out what he’s complaining about in order to address that recent bad article…and what do I find? His usual half-assed whining about people different from him.

When I gave a lecture in the Deep South some years ago, I went to dinner with several of the biology faculty, who told me of the occurrence of “furries” (actually, better known as “otherkins”) among the students. “Otherkins” are students who dress up and act like nonhuman animals in their day-to-day life. But the group the profs were really concerned with were students who identified as animals, claiming that they had the spirit of animals, insisting on being addressed as the animal they identified with, and wore animal costumes like ears or tails. These are the true “otherkins”. I saw several of these, including one girl who had a horse tail stuck in the back of her pants. The professors told me that they had been given special instruction by the university on how to treat and deal with the otherkins.

I haven’t seen any otherkins at my University, but this Torygraph article (click on the screenshot to go to the archived piece) notes that it is an issue in Britain, and schools don’t know how to deal with it. I was sent this article by a Brit who couldn’t believe that the phenomenon was real. I assured my correspondent that yes, this is a reality.

Oh god. No, it’s not real. Furries/otherkin do exist, but they are fully aware of their identities — they just enjoy role-playing. Seeing a girl with a horsetail stuck in her pants does not mean they’re running around, thinking they are a horse, and that the university needs to provide special instructions for how to deal with them. Just talk to them. You know, like they’re human beings. That works. I’ve even attended a furry convention, and honestly, it’s no more weird than attending a D&D con…or an atheist convention.

What next? Is he going to declare that American schools are putting out kitty litter for the kids who identify as cats?

Anyway, in this case he credulously goes on to tell the story of kids in England thinking they are cats and other animals.

Perhaps tellingly, the incident at Rye College – a Church of England school – happened at the end of a class on “life education” in which children were told by their teacher that there were lots of genders, including “agender – people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.

An argument ensued in which two pupils disagreed with the teacher, saying there was no such thing as agender, because “if you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy – that’s it”.

When the pupils told their classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” the teacher reprimanded them for “questioning [the child’s] identity”.

In this instance, the teacher in charge of the class appears to have bracketed a child’s desire to be treated as a cat with other children’s desire to be treated as another gender, or genderless.

To Coyne, this is evidence of his bigoted presumption that this is a case of social contagion promulgated by both peers and also by teachers who have been indoctrinated by gender activism to accept any child’s assumed identity. Indoctrination! Gender activism! Social contagion!

Except…that’s not what happened at all. It’s all hyper-inflated hyperbole from the UK news media. The school has said it didn’t happen.

In a statement to Schools Week, the trust said it wanted to “clarify that no children at Rye College identifies as a cat or any other animal”.

Doesn’t matter. By then, GB News, the Daily Mail, and Tucker Carlson were promoting the kind of nonsense that finds favor with Coyne, all based on a brief Tik Tok excerpt of a longer discussion held in the classroom. One reporter, Otto English, dug deeper and interviewed one of the people involved.

We have taken the time both to establish this individual’s credibility and to safeguard their identity and as such the individual is anonymous and some critical details given to us have been deliberately omitted. I am very aware that the two children who made the recording are also just that – children – and so have taken care to omit details about them and some of the things they are alleged to have said on the day.

I shall refer to the ‘cat’ pupil as ‘Student A’ and the two individuals who made the tape as “B” and “C”.

Our correspondent – present in the room – tells us: I want to make (it) clear that ‘A’ does not identify as a cat.

What, by our source’s account, happened is that there was an ongoing conversation happening between several pupils about identity before B and C engaged with them and – according to our source – as the discussion became increasingly personal and ill-tempered, either B or C then said, apropos of gender: ‘if you identify as a cat or a carrot you are insane’.

In other words, nobody was talking about ‘cats’ until the subject of them was introduced into the conversation by one of the two pupils who later made the recording. This was a broad-ranging conversation about gender and identity between a group of kids in Year 8 which seems to have turned nasty before the teacher intervened.

Our source defends the teacher and says that having started out ‘extremely calm’ she only became ‘irritable’ when the two students became increasingly ‘disrespectful’.

That’s it. People can be grumpy when arguing about sex and gender — Coyne should know, he’s a good example. That’s all this was, young people expressing their opinions, and there were no cat-people involved.

It’s simply a British example of the litter boxes in the classroom lie that was spread over here on this side of the Atlantic, and anyone who falls for it should not be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, my expectation has been confirmed

It just went “whoompf”

Call off the search, the missing submersible has been found.

The ROV found a nose cone from the submersible that led them to finding a large debris field that was from the vessel, Rear Adm. John Mauger told reporters. “That was the first indication that there was a catastrophic event,” he said.

It was a catastrophic implosion.

The good news: the passengers’ demise was very, very, very quick, and they probably didn’t even realize what was happening.

<Homer drooling noises>

Look at that fish!

It’s beautiful. That’s the only thing I care about in this photo — I want someone to buy me a fishing junket to Alaska. My dad managed to make a few salmon fishing trips in his last years, and I think they made him happy.

By the way, the guy on the right is a supreme court judge. He got flown on a private plane to this fishing camp, with a billionaire, Paul Singer, footing the $100,000 bill. It paid for Singer to do that, since he had several cases before the court, and got favorable rulings. That fish is a bribe.

It’s looking like Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society goon, is hooking up each Supreme Court appointee with their very own billionaire sugar daddy. Clarence Thomas got one, Sam Alito got one, I wonder whose patronage each of the other judges got? Somebody had to have paid off Kavanaugh’s loans. I’d like to know who. Let us know who bought each member of the Supreme Court.

Still, that is a magnificent King Salmon. That’s the price of a corrupt judge? OK, maybe some ethics rules would be good.

Jerry Coyne’s bogus fears of “ideological subversion”

I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.

[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.

Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:

That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.

Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.

Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:

Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.

You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.

Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.

The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.

It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.

I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.

Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.

Elon Musk thinks my identity is a slur! EMOTIONAL DAMAGE

I’m afraid that I must confess that I am cis — I have the sexual identity I was assigned at birth — and I’m also heterosexual. I’ve always taken it for granted, I’ve never been tempted to taste of “forbidden fruit,” and I wouldn’t even consider the expense and struggle of hormone treatments or reassignment surgery. I’ve been fortunate to have been born in easy mode, where everything lines up conveniently in the socially conventional way, and I have no desire to be otherwise.

But now, to my immense surprise, I discover that my identity is anathema on certain social media platforms. I have become…a slur.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

Ironically, this dictate has been delivered by a cis man. He must be a self-loathing cis heterosexual man.

Honestly, cis is simply an objective, non-judgmental descriptive term. It is not and never has been an insult. What’s next? Will Elon Musk ban people who use terms like “man” or “woman,” too?

Missing submersible is still in the news

We’re in the countdown phase: newspapers are now reporting estimates of the number of hours of oxygen left in the device. That’s like estimating the degree of misery and suffering five people might currently be experiencing on the basis of practically no information.

It’s fairly roomy for a crypt

What little information we do have tells me that all five are dead and died virtually instantaneously. The stories that matter are about the shortcuts and problems this company’s submersibles. Did you know that little porthole in front was only rated for a depth of 1300 meters while the big carbon fiber tank was going down to 4000 meters? Oops.

The tourist submersible that went missing while exploring the Titanic wreck was previously the target of safety complaints from an employee of OceanGate, the parent company that owns the sub and runs tourist expeditions of the wreck. That employee complained specifically that the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme depths before he was fired.

That’s according to legal documents obtained by The New Republic. According to the court documents, in a 2018 case, OceanGate employee David Lochridge, a submersible pilot, voiced concerns about the safety of the sub. According to a press release, Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time, “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients.”

I’ll make two bold predictions: 1) the submersible and its occupants are the victims of a catastrophic implosion. 2) Hoo boy, the lawsuits that are about to land on OceanGate means that company will catastrophically cease to exist.

Trans boxer defeats cis athlete!

It happened again. A trans person used the natural advantages of their true biological origins to change sex and rule over the cis folk in an athletic competition. We have to do something to stop this!

Except it was a trans man who was assigned female at birth who beat a cis man in a boxing match. I am so confused. Does this mean “biological women” are naturally, intrinsically better at boxing than born men?

Quick, someone use TERF logic consistently to explain this away for me.

Cool! Let’s go to Enceladus!

So that’s why aliens in UFOs have been visiting Earth

I fully support exploration of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It’s a complicated body, it’s got frozen water ice, it has oceans of water beneath all that ice, and analysis has shown that it has all the elements essential for life (CHNOPS). Even a biologist would love to know more!

So here’s someone with a plan to get to Enceladus, the Space Ocean Corp. I hate it already. It’s fantasy math.

SPACE OCEAN CORP is a private Texas holding company. Incorporated September 2021. Regulation D 506(C) Unregistered Security Offering. Investor Deck (pdf)

Water is worth $1 Billion per gallon in space (on Mars, on other moons and planet). If a mission to collect it costs $8 Billion; and we’re able to collect just 10 gallons, it can be sold at a $2 Billion net profit. Collect 1,500 to 100,000 gallons, then gross profit is $1.5 Trillion to $100 Trillion.

I’m not an economist, but…isn’t scarcity the reason they’ve invented this imaginary value of $1 Billion per gallon? It’s not really worth that much. No one is paying (or can afford) a billion dollars for a gallon of water. This entire prospectus is built around this magical number as if it is real.

There are over one quadrillion gallons of water on the moon Enceladus. The volume of a sphere of water with a 25 mile deep radius is approximately 72 quadrillion gallons. If we set up a well for $6-$8 Billion, the initial cost to Space Ocean Corp investors will be a drop in the bucket compared to the ROI gain in market cap.

I can multiply numbers together. I can calculate the volume of a sphere. That is not the basis for a complex, high-tech space industry. But they’re using this elementary fact to fish for investors! Stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. Is Peter Thiel available?

They continue. They’ve got a glib Neil deGrasse Tyson quote! That’s worth money, right?

Goal: Extract & Store water from ocean moons. Phase 1) video an ocean on a moon in the solar system. Phase 2) extract water from that moon. Phase 3) sell the water to space companies and organizations. Phase 4) repeat. Phase 5) Video every ocean in the solar system.

“Water in space costs $10,000 per pound to put into orbit … If you can get it there cheaper, that’s a business model.” Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Future of Colonizing Space- Neil deGrasse Tyson- WGS 2018

Space Ocean Corp and several organizations are partnering up to send a spacecraft to collect water on Enceladus, with the potential to generate a profit of up to $100 Trillion from the initial investment of $8 Billion. Join us!

The ocean on Enceladus is 25 miles deep, making it a valuable source of water in deep space, worth an estimated $1 billion per gallon. We are looking to collect between 1,500 and 100,000 gallons of water from this source and store it on the moon or in orbit, at a Lagrange point, for sale to space organizations.

We’re aiming to launch a private mission to Enceladus, despite the fact that there have been more than 10 government missions already planned for the moon.

By the way, every page on that site has a header with that slogan, Video every ocean in the solar system and store the water, to sustain life in space. It’s in their goals, to video an ocean and to video every ocean in the solar system. I don’t get it. Are they counting on that sweet YouTube money to make them profitable?

I would just ask a simple question: where is that $100 trillion profit coming from? Who is paying that money to Space Ocean Corp? Carolyn Porco (you know, the famous planetary scientist) had that same thought, and asked them about it.

When I asked, ‘What’s your business model?’, they said, ‘Musk’.

What did I tell you? They’re looking for stupid, innumerate, delusional investors. That’s a good choice, except…Musk doesn’t have $100 trillion.

I would love to see Enceladus explored, but one thing this company ignores is that if there is extraterrestrial life there, we would need to be exceedingly careful to avoid contaminating it. I don’t see Space Ocean Corp giving a damn about that — more likely they’d be complaining about the environmentalists wrecking their money-making plan. They are from Texas, after all.