The US is going to ban TikTok?

I’m sorry, I’m just now learning that congress has passed legislation to force the sale of TikTok. This is just weird…our uber-capitalist nation is trying to control an independent Chinese corporation?

Wait, not sorry. I don’t use TikTok, so in a personal sense, I don’t care. I’ve glanced at it, and it’s the worst social media app out there — it’s nothing but blipverts for idiots and posers. I never saw the appeal, although it does seem to be extremely popular.

Oh wait, sorry again, Facebook is definitely the most atrocious, evil, terrible social media app. I abandoned that so long ago that I’d forgotten how awful it was. Instagram is bad, too, but I do have an account there, and for the same reason I clung to Facebook as long as I did — I’ve got family who use it, so it’s nice to keep up with them. Although that useful function is being diluted by the fact that I’m seeing family photos interspersed with mobile game ads that I don’t want to play and vapid photos of young women just standing there, smiling at me. I’m a crotchety old man, I just want to yell at them to do something, say something, tell a joke, do you think being pretty is sufficient reason to interfere with my interactions with people I care about? It’s not good.

The solution to my grumpiness is simple, though: don’t subscribe to TikTok, unsubscribe from services that don’t appeal, let people who do like them use them. That feels almost…libertarian to me, but OK, not meddling seems like a good approach.

But then I learn that Trump has an alternative solution. He wants Elon Musk to buy TikTok.

Can you imagine, after seeing the hash he’s made of Twitter, how much worse Musk would make TikTok?

These guys all make the worst possible decisions.

What’s the opposite of chocolate and peanut butter?

I can imagine much worse, but I didn’t want to make you all sick

You know, the old “two great tastes that taste great together” slogan, only the opposite of that — two awful things that become even more awful when combined? I tried imagining something unpleasantly yucky, and then picturing a completely different yuk, and then mixed them up in my imagination, and only succeeded in making myself mildly nauseous.

Then I discovered that Answers in Genesis had done the exercise for me. They have announced that they are combining the idiocy of young earth creationism with the hype of AI, and then I felt extremely nauseous.

We’ve been talking about doing this project for some time now, and I’m excited to finally announce a brand-new tool to help you find answers to your questions: AI Genesis. This chat tool, an extension of our website, has been under development and testing for months, and we’ve now rolled out a beta (test) version for anyone who has an account on our website.

You can ask our AI a wide variety of questions, such as:

• What was the shape of Noah’s ark?
• What’s the best evidence for a young earth?
• Is Genesis derived from ancient myths?
• What happened to the dinosaurs?
• Are the Gospels trustworthy?
• How can I share the gospel with someone who is trans?

I don’t have an account on their website — I haven’t even tried, but Ken Ham has gone all fatwah on my butt so I doubt I’d succeed — but I’m confident that they’ve implemented a glorified chatbot to deliver highly filtered creationist messages to their audience. One thing I have to commend AiG for is that they’ve hired some competent people to manage their internet presence. Have you looked at their SEO? Try to use Google to find specific details about AiG, and instead you get page after page of fluff written by AiG proponents. It’s amazingly useless.

But then, Google pretty much sucks nowadays.

Australians don’t fool me

A new species of funnel web spider has been discovered in Australia — the largest of its kind, and possibly the most venomous, most deadly spider in the world. The news reports, though, aren’t full of scary stories and people going “ooh eek, kill it with fire” stuff. The words you’ll hear in this short report are “happy” and “proud”.

I’m beginning to think I might have been born in the wrong country.

I’ll never be able to read Neil Gaiman’s work again

The idea that we should be able to separate the artist and their art is an idealistic one, but I just read this exposé of Gaiman’s history of sexual abuse, and no, just no. Every gentle, thoughtful, open-minded word he ever wrote was a lie. The image he presented was a facade, while what was lurking behind his illusion of gentility was a rapist, a selfish brute, an ex-scientologist steeped in that privileged nonsense.

He deserves obscurity and contempt. Actually, what he deserves is a felony conviction and jail time. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the deserving don’t get what’s coming to them.

Believe in belief, says famous physicist

Marcelo Gleiser is a humble guy. The Templeton Foundation just awarded him $1.5 million for being humble, as we know because when asked, “which aspect of your work do you think is most relevant to the Templeton Foundation’s spiritual aims?” by Scientific American, he claims he was given all that money for his humility.

Probably my belief in humility. I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you’ll see that yes, it is wonderful — magnificent! — but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know. So that’s one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic.

Oh. I suspect his position against atheism was a more relevant criterion in the award — I don’t think that people who brag about their humility are particularly humble, especially not when they think their humility is so vast and impressive that it deserves millions of dollars.

I’m also surprised by his claim that being an agnostic means he is opposed to people who make claims against the existence of a god. Does he express a similar opposition to people who make positive claims in favor of the existence of a god? I think not. He wouldn’t have won a Templeton prize if he did. Also, he’s very confused about what atheism is.

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.”

How dare those atheists simply not believe in a phenomenon for which they have no evidence! That is inconsistent with the scientific method, which according to Gleiser, expects you to accept any hypothesis in the absence of evidence! Better yet, you should accept it even if the only evidence you’ve got is against it!

I’d reply to his question “what is atheism?” by turning it around and asking “what are gods?” What are these things you expect us to respect and even believe? Be specific. I suspect that all I’d get is hand-wavey babble about spirituality.

More seriously, he opposes rejecting a hypothesis for the trivial flaw of being unsupported by any evidence.

But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation

OK, I agree with part of that. You do have to have evidence for a hypothesis — you can’t make a proposal to NIH and expect to get funded if you have no preliminary evidence from your lab or the scientific literature to justify it (although you can submit such an empty proposal to the Templeton Foundation and get a big bucket of cash in return). However, we do have the right to strongly and provisionally reject a claim that is advanced in the absence of any support — in fact, it is necessary that we reject unfounded hypotheses out of hand, unless we want to waste immense amounts of time and effort and money in the futile pursuit of nonsense.

I encourage Dr Gleiser to invest that $1.5 million to research the existence of elves, which have roughly the same amount of evidentiary support as gods. It’s the scientific thing to do. Or, since he’s a theoretical physicist, maybe it would be more appropriate to use the money to make a perpetual motion machine. There is an immense number of absurd hypotheses that are dismissed by sensible scientists, and among them is the god hypothesis. That’s the atheist position that Gleiser opposes. Before you can expect rational people to believe your claims, you have to have a body of acts of god that aren’t better explained by natural mechanisms. No, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t count, because we don’t believe it and you’ve got nothing but cultish claims and confused exaggerations in a holy book to back it up.

To return to his claim of humility, he doesn’t believe that at all. He thinks humans are all special!

You know, I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets (and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is absolutely amazing.

Great. What’s the new hypothesis to replace the idea that we’re the product of universal general properties of physics and chemistry? What’s special about Earth? Is there a specific insight that contributes to science that can be used here? The “rare earth” hypothesis is usually used as a tool to smuggle a god into the works, rather than chance and necessity.

He goes on and on, and some of the things he says are sensible — like yeah, we should take better care of our planet — but to be honest, I don’t care. I stopped caring when I read “Templeton Prize”.

Maybe we should just cancel the whole semester?

Classes are scheduled to start tomorrow. I’m ready, I’ve got a couple of weeks of lectures in the can, swarms of flies at the starting gate, and a grand plan for lab work that’ll take me all the way to May. Students are probably trickling back this weekend, except…

It’s -12°C, snowing, and we’ve got 40kph winds howling outside my window. It’s supposed to drop to -20°C tonight. There are travel advisories up all over the place.

I’m anticipating a half-empty classroom tomorrow. I don’t anticipate the school being closed — this is Minnesota, we take a stubborn pride in plowing ahead through the most frightful weather — but I might have to offer the class over Zoom, for just this one day. I have a strong allergic response to Zoom anymore, but it might be the safest recourse.

It’s all Kilkenny Cats out there

The civil war sundering the Republican party continues. Steve Bannon minces no words in his hatred of Elon Musk.

“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published on Wednesday. The article was flagged on Saturday by Bannon’s former employer, Breitbart, which published excerpts in English.

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

I am made extremely uncomfortable by my agreement with Steve Bannon, and I hope he and Musk engage in a game of mutual annihilation. I also appreciate all the irony he is delivering.

In addition to Musk, Bannon blasted David Sacks and Peter Thiel, who also have roots in apartheid South Africa.

“Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon said. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

You know, Bannon’s gripe with Musk is over those H-1B visas, that allows some well-educated brown people to live and work (and be exploited) in the USA, polluting his vision of an all-white America — yet white South Africans are the most racist people? Come on, guy. Racists are diverse, too, and both Bannon and Musk are equally racist, just in different ways. Racism is a spectrum, ranging from red-faced, rummy-nosed blustering MAGAts to pale flabby bros with sketchy facial hair. Kumbaya! Now go murder each other. I don’t want to see anything left but a pair of tails.

The ghouls are rising in California

Ray Comfort is doing his thing, blaming the California wildfires on Hollywood blasphemy. I warn you, this video is a combination of the nauseating and the banal: Ray is trapped in his usual schtick. First we get excerpts from the Golden Globes, to tell us how awful Glen Powell is and how evil Hollywood is, and then…he can’t help himself. He starts interviewing random people on the beach, asking them what caused the wildires (they don’t know), then asking them if they ever told a lie, etc., before telling them they have to find Jesus, when, presumably, the rains will come down.

Jeez, but I despise that loathsome little freak.

Man tracks!

Dan Olson has been soaking in the history of creationism, and has come out with an excellent YouTube documentary. It starts with the Paluxy dinosaur tracks, and leads to Clifford Burdick, The Genesis Flood, and frauds like Kent Hovind. And then Carl Baugh shows up, a true charlatan.

It’s familiar stuff, but really well presented. Well worth an hour and a half.

Once more unto the breach

I’m preparing to teach genetics again, and as usual, I’m trying to rework some of the lectures, because I don’t care to say the same thing every year. I had one odd thought that I’m probably not going to squeeze into the lectures this year, but thought I’d bounce it off people here.

Evolution and genetics were on parallel tracks in this very interesting period of 1860-1910. While the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War might have been distracting most people, biologists had their own obsessions. Charles Darwin published in 1859; Gregor Mendel in 1863. Darwin had immediate popular success, while Mendel was basically ignored and neglected. I was contemplating why the difference was there, and had a random idea.

Darwin started with a phenomenological and largely descriptive foundation, no significant math anywhere in The Origin. Mendel’s brief paper was little more than a mathematical hypothesis, with limited qualitative description — it was just peas, one model system, and the traits weren’t even particularly interesting, except for the fact that their inheritance was so discrete.

Evolution took off fast, and rather erratically. There were so many bad hypotheses built on the framework of natural selection (for instance, all of Haeckel’s work) that by the end of the 19th century, Darwinism (and in this case, that was an appropriate name for it) was fading, and people were finding flaws and poking holes in the idea. The absence of a quantitative basis for analysis was killing evolutionary theory.

Meanwhile, Mendel’s laws of inheritance weren’t getting any attention, but there was all this foundational qualitative work getting done — cell theory was being established, microscopy was taking off (instruments were reaching the physical limits of optics), Weismann had worked out the limitations of cellular inheritance, Sutton and others were publishing all this tantalizing stuff about chromosomes. When 1900 rolled around and Mendel was rediscovered, everyone was primed for his statistical/probabilistic theory of inheritance. We could do math on it!

Also, evolution was rescued by it’s happy marriage to genetics and in particular, population genetics. We could do math on evolution, too!

Everything is better with mathematics, is my conclusion. Except maybe individual success — before 1900, someone could come up with a hot theory and get it named after themselves. Afterwards, there’s too much detailed quantitative thinking going on for any one person, and eponymous theories went out of style, being regarded with suspicion, even.

Along comes SMBC to correct me:

OK, OK, it’s not just mathematics, it’s thinking precisely. But isn’t that what math is? How do you think precisely without the application of math and statistics and quantitative reasoning?