Aquarists fear

I’ve been an aquarist for a few decades, but the largest aquarium I’ve ever owned was 29 gallons. I was more about assembling many aquaria, and I think maybe the largest total capacity I’ve ever had was about 150 gallons. Every aquarist has the nightmare of something happening to the aquaria — I remember George Streisinger (the original zebrafish guy) recounting his terrible dream about the quonset hut where the entire initial zebrafish colony was housed having a catastrophic collapse and all his work getting wiped out.

This is a setup for the fabulous Berlin AquaDom, a giant million liter aquarium housing about 1500 exotic fish. Here it is, isn’t it beautiful?

Fantastic. I wonder what kind of nightmares the owners had? Because they all just came true.

There was speculation freezing temperatures that got down to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight caused a crack in the acrylic glass tank, which then exploded under the weight of the water. Police said there was no evidence the incident resulted from a malicious act.

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes.

Worst time of the year for travel

I imagine Australia doesn’t have the same problems we do here in Minnesota — the major artery to Morris is a sheet of ice right now, with drifting snow blowing around — but still this is a bad time to travel, as FDotM illustrates.

Trains? We ain’t got no stinkin’ trains. They even discontinued the bus service, and we have to somehow get ourselves to a town 45 minutes away to get a shuttle. My choice is the first one: stay at home with the pigs and chickens…only in this case, it’s a cat and a lot of spiders. My wife and I will be spending Christmas home alone in a small snowy midwestern town.

So what are you doing for the holidays?

The purges have begun

First, I publicly deplore all stalkers, and apparently some people have been stalking and harassing Elon Musk, and someone was following his family around. This is despicable. There are people, irrespective of what political position they hold, who lose all perspective and turn their personal dislike for someone into a crusade, and that is a behavior that must be opposed.

However, it is interesting that rather than relying on the police, the law, and social opprobrium to deal with the problem, Musk is lashing out at journalism.

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

@ElonJet wasn’t stalking him. The account was posting publicly available information that you can still get online (although less conveniently formatted), and it had been arbitrarily closed by Musk, after he’d said he wouldn’t.

On Wednesday, @ElonJet was permanently suspended despite a tweet from Musk weeks earlier, saying he would keep it up as part of “my commitment to free speech.”

So much for his commitment to free speech. His latest spasm is even more revealing, though — he’s killing accounts for even mentioning the @ElonJet account, or reporting on confrontations with his stalker.

Around 11:30 p.m. Thursday, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces chat — essentially a public conference call — with several journalists, including some who had been banned, in which he reiterated his claim that they had “doxed” him.

The journalists challenged him on this.

“You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true,” said Harwell.

Musk retorted, “You posted a link to the address.”

Harwell replied, “In the course of reporting on @ElonJet, we posted a link to @ElonJet, which is now not online.”

Musk left the call abruptly about four minutes into it.

He has since shut down Twitter Spaces. Or maybe it just broke because he’s been starving the maintenance teams?

We’re now entering the tyrant’s paranoia phase, where he is afraid of all the enemies he imagines are out to get him. He’s losing everywhere — Twitter was never a money-maker to begin with, but now Tesla’s value is plummeting, people are beginning to look at his other business ventures with a skeptical eye (The Boring Company and Hyperloop were clearly useless scams intended to kill mass transit), and his Mars fantasies are pretentious delusions — and he’s seeing well-deserved criticism as personal attacks and even threats to his life. This is a bad attitude to have if you’re trying to run a company whose whole purpose is to allow and encourage free discussion about anything and everything. If his incompetence doesn’t kill Twitter, his eagerness to ban journalists who tweet will do the job.

It’s also hypocritical. Many of us have experienced online stalking that has risen to disruptive levels, far worse than what Elon Musk gets. The old Twitter just shrugged and ignored it, allowing Nazis and misogynists to harass whoever they wanted, and Musk has made it worse. You want to cry and complain about people picking on you, but at the same time you’ve dismantled what little machinery Twitter had in place to police that kind of behavior? I’m not going to feel much sympathy for your chickenshit fee-fees.

Do you want $100,000? (Or is it $200,000?)

I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.

One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.

The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.

‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.

It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.

So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.

Fox News is mad at a Minnesota teacher

And it’s not me! They’re upset because a St Paul science teacher is a socialist, and not shy about it.

A Minnesota science teacher in the Saint Paul Public Schools district lambasted cell biology lessons, particularly on mitochondrion, for containing “capitalist” propaganda, Fox News Digital found.

Mandi Jung, a teacher at Highland Park Middle School, said, “Lately, there’s been a lot of conversation about teachers indoctrinating students to their beliefs. And I always find this funny because our children are seeped in capitalist indoctrination from like the second they’re born, basically.”

She’s right, you know.

Jung proceeded to provide the “perfect example” of how “capitalist indoctrination” is expressed in her seventh grade science classes.

“Seventh grade science… [is] the year that you learn that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and all this cell biology. So at the end of the unit, I have [students] take a test. And one of the questions is ‘A person says the nucleus is the most important organelle in the cell. Do you agree or disagree, and why?”

“And almost every child says, ‘Yes, I agree. Because without a boss, the cell would be in total chaos.’”

Jung added the students’ responses “cracks me up,” and went on to claim microscopic bacteria were the “original anarchists.”

“Bacteria don’t have a nucleus, and they are arguably one of the most successful classes of organisms on the planet. Bacteria out here being the original anarchists, right? No nucleus, no master. Seize the means of metabolism. I don’t know. It’s funny to me,” she said.

She’s right again! I’d also mention our erythrocytes, which lack a nucleus and seem to function just fine. It’s a good point she’s making, that all the organelles in a cell are functioning cooperatively, without any one running the show.

Fox News makes her point for her, and finds it outrageous that anyone would have an anti-capitalist opinion, and went running to the administration to tattle on her.

Fox News Digital asked the Saint Paul Public Schools district whether Jung’s commentary is part of its curriculum, and they sent over a science unit used in the district. The district did not directly answer the question.

Jung frequently posts anti-capitalist views on her social media platforms.

For example, she shared on Twitter, “You are not a capitalist, you are an exploited worker with Stockholm syndrome.”

The sentence in the middle is revealing: she says these things on “her social media platforms.” She is allowed to hold her own opinions, you know, and she was making a valid point with her test question, even if the anti-science twits at Fox don’t understand it.

She’s been in trouble with Fox before. She dared to hand out a survey in class asking their preferred pronouns.

The questions asked students about their preferred pronouns and names, and whether those can be used when speaking directly with a student’s parents.

Some of the questions included:

“What name should I use when speaking to your parents?”
“What pronouns should we use when we talk about you? (CHOOSE AS MANY AS YOU WANT)”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to your parents?”
“Is it okay to use the pronouns you selected above when we talk to other students or the class?

Are you horrified yet? Of course, Fox News went screeching to the authorities. They got rebuffed.

Fox News Digital reached out to the district for comment, and a spokesperson referred to existing policy which said, “Respect all students’ gender identity and gender expression by honoring the right of students to be identified and addressed by their preferred name and pronoun.”

They go on to complain that she asked these questions of students without telling their parents. They’re keeping the parents “in the dark”! I guess students aren’t allowed to have autonomy, or question capitalist hegemony, or even consider the fact that there are forces that want to keep students in the dark.

I also wish to report Mandi Jung to the St Paul school district…for a commendation. We need more teachers like that.

He’s making a list…

There’s something suspicious about making lists, especially when the list-maker clearly has nefarious intent.

Today it has been reported that Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas attempted to get a record of all transgender people who have legally changed their gender on their drivers license in the state. Although the initial request only asked for the monthly numbers of those who changed gender markers, the request did state that they may need drivers licenses and ID numbers later – some of which were eventually delivered. This comes months after Paxton sent a letter to Governor Greg Abbott that stated the parents of transgender children in Texas should be investigated for child abuse. This policy has been nearly universally decried and led to harsh investigations and suicide attempts among trans youth in Texas. Fears of registries continue to grow in the transgender community as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and other states all consider policies that would create lists of trans people in the state. These lists can ultimately be used for nefarious means, especially if you believe that states will continue to target transgender people with laws designed to further restrict and criminalize their lives.

I wonder why he wants a list of all the trans folk in Texas? Do you think it’s so they can deliver appropriate health care more efficiently?

Just when I think I’m out, they drag me back in

OK already. It’s supposed to be my break, but I had to take care of some things, for the spring term. So I got students registered for my writing course, got flies ordered for my genetics course, and worked out my spring calendar. One pleasant surprise: my schedule fell out in such a way that I have no classes on Friday (three day weekends all semester long!) and no class before 11:45, which is a bit of a waste since I’m up by 6am every day anyway. Although it does mean I’ll have a fair amount of Spider Time to look forward to.

Now go away, job. I don’t want to think about you any more until January.

Except for the grading I have to do on Saturday, that is.

The ugly death of Twitter at the hands of a clown

Some of us are trying to make ends meet. Some of us are worrying about how we can afford retirement. Some of us are looking at medical bills and weeping. But not Elon Musk! He’s the what-me-worry kid. He borrowed billions for an impulsive purchase of Twitter, and he’s not worried at all about his rather desperate situation.

With interest on his loans totaling over $150m/month and a company grossing $5B before screwing it all up and chasing the advertisers out, Twitter’s reluctant purchaser Elon Musk seems to be running out of options.

He’s bleeding $150 million every month on just the interest payments? On a company he is visibly mismanaging? In his shoes (his brightly-colored, oversized clown shoes), I’d be a wreck. I’d be worried about all the employees I was letting down, and how I’d meet operating costs, let alone the interest. But not Elon! He has a plan!

To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Mr. Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.

Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.

The aggressive moves signal that Mr. Musk is still slashing expenditures and is bending or breaking Twitter’s previous agreements to make his mark. His reign has been characterized by chaos, a series of resignations and layoffs, reversals of the platform’s previous suspensions and rules, and capricious decisions that have driven away advertisers.

Whoa, you can do that? I could just refuse to make our mortgage payments or skip out on our credit card bill? That would free up a whole lot of money that I could spend on fun stuff.

I think, though, that at some point the law would catch up with me, and I’d be evicted or forced to meet my contractual obligations or maybe even be arrested and jailed. Could that happen to the second richest man in the world? Probably not, because the world is not just. We’ll have to settle for watching his reputation get flushed away.