So beautiful…

Biden really is trying to make me vote for him in the next election.

This is big. Really big. Open up all that science, we paid for it! From the White House:

This research, which changes our lives and transforms our world, is made possible by American tax dollars. And yet, these advancements are behind a paywall and out of reach for too many Americans. In too many cases, discrimination and structural inequalities – such as funding disadvantages experienced by minority-serving colleges and institutions – prevent some communities from reaping the rewards of the scientific and technological advancements they have helped to fund. Factors including race, age, disability status, geography, economic background, and gender have historically and systemically excluded some Americans from the accessing the full benefits of scientific research.

To tackle this injustice, and building on the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to advance policy that benefits all of America, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released new policy guidance today to ensure more equitable access to federally funded research. All members of the American public should be able to take part in every part of the scientific enterprise—leading, participating in, accessing, and benefitting from taxpayer-funded scientific research. That is, all communities should be able to take part in America’s scientific possibilities.

What’s Crazy Joe going to do next? Legalize marijuana, create a Universal Basic Income, strip the broadcasting license from Fox News, free university, declare the Age of Aquarius? I like it.

Super Mama Spider

I walked into the lab with some trepidation — I have lots of teaching stuff to do today, and I have one egg sac that is ready to pop, which would require me to spend a fair amount of time pushing baby spiders around and sorting them into vials. Fortunately, no new hatchings today, but look at this! She just won’t stop! (don’t be scared, it’s just one adult spider here, and she’s just a fuzzy blob.)

That’s one, two, three, four, five egg sacs. She made a new one! You can see the one almost about to hatch out on the left — the spiderlings have legs that are darkening up. Then, roughly in the middle, there’s one that’s getting a bit brown, and it’ll probably go in two weeks or so. Then THREE more at earlier stages of development. You can probably see mama in the back, too.

Also, look at all the spider poop on the bottom. It’s about time to do a cage cleaning.

I’ve got a reprieve today, but maybe a cloud of spiderlings to deal with tomorrow, or on Saturday.

Mama’s first generation is doing well, near as I can tell. A few of the females are getting so huge that they can barely move anymore, and now I’m worried that they might be getting egg-bound. Fish get egg-bound, where they are full of eggs, but they can’t get them out and they bloat up and can die horrible deaths. Can spiders get egg-bound? I don’t know. Maybe they’re waiting for a helpful male to fertilize them so they can start producing a third generation of egg sacs.

I might have to introduce some of the boys and girls to each other this weekend and see what happens.

Racist? Or not?

The happy lady at the right is Kim Crockett, a Minnesotan who is running for the office of Secretary of State. I don’t want to rush into any accusations here, but she might be a bit racist. I’ll let you be the judge, and just present the facts.

  • She’s a Republican. I know, I know, but let’s assess the preponderance of the evidence.
  • She’s an election-denier who says the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”.
  • She was dismayed at all the Somalis immigrating to Minnesota. “I think of America, the great assimilator, as a rubber band, but with this — we’re at the breaking point,” she was quoted as saying. “These aren’t people coming from Norway, let’s put it that way. These people are very visible.” See? She’s not anti-immigrant. It’s fine if they’re coming from Norway.
  • Now she is concerned about who should be allowed to vote in our elections. “So, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English, which raises the question: Should they be voting? We can talk about that another time.”

Oh, wait. I think maybe “racist” is an inadequate word to cover the breadth of her bigotry. Never mind.

And she’s running for Secretary of State, the office that oversees our elections! Fortunately, her opponent is a competent DFL guy, Steve Simon, who is going to run right over her in November.

Harnessing the power of spiders to bomb Nazis

This is an unusual story: in WWII, the US government needed the finest, strongest strands of silk for bombsights, so they turned to the Spider Lady, Nan Songer. She was commissioned to extract the silk from spiders and pass it on.

Songer began experimenting with black widows (genus Latrodectus), which produce a silk dragline composed of six strands to stabilize themselves in midair and control their landings. By separating this thread into individual strands with a needle, she achieved the width that the military needed. “The strands were virtually invisible to the naked eye,” Sahara Quinn, a historian and vice president of the Yucaipa Historical Society, tells The Scientist. Yet they carried illumination better than silk from other species, helping the crosshairs stand out against a background.

Through her experiments, Songer also devised a novel technique for extracting silk in greater quantities. She carefully pinned living spiders belly up and then used a hairlike yucca strip to stroke their abdomens until they produced strands, which she collected with a small hook. Using this “silking” technique, Songer was able to harvest reams of silk that she wrapped around frames for transport. The US government quickly became her biggest client; its couriers traveled to Yucaipa with empty briefcases handcuffed to their wrists to prevent theft.

I am impressed. I’ve extracted long silk lines from spiders unintentionally — that part is easy — but then separating them into single strands? I didn’t even know there were 6 strands in a line of silk!

Unfortunately, the process has been replaced with synthetic fibers. Too bad. Retiring to a spider croft where I spend my last days spinning artisan silk was sounding attractive.

Also, the Nazis are all gone now, right?

Wipe it all out, and make the Republicans cry

I’ll have you know I took out student loans for college — it was mid-1970s levels of tuition, but it was still debt — and I also had to work my way through for four years, plus summers spent doing stoop labor to build up some savings. And then I paid it all off with the sweat of my brow, diligently making those quarterly payments, and eventually working my way out from under the burden. It was an obligation! I was loaned that money on specific terms, and I signed a contract!

And now Joe Biden is wiping out $10,000-20,000 of debt per college student with a snap of his fingers? They can just forget about it?

Good. It should be more, but this is a great start.

I don’t have good memories of all the labor I put in just to get the education I wanted. I was going to school to learn biology, not to pick weeds or put in long hours cleaning glassware or scrubbing cat poop out of an animal facility, and really, the job I was training for was not one that would ever pay a big salary, so deferring repayments until I was wealthy was never going to happen. So yeah, give those young folks a break, especially since tuition costs have skyrocketed since my day.

I have no patience for the flurry of outraged Republicans demanding that everyone must suffer as they did (as if they did — I predict that the ones who squawk the loudest are the children of privilege who had Mummy & Daddy pay for everything, and buy them a new car and European vacations on top of that). College ought to be free to everyone. It’s the only way we’re going to educate ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in.

Additionally…

Those poor losers! You should give more money to some bankers to atone for their suffering.

First class kerblooiee

I can’t say it was successfully completed, though — it was a disaster. We’ve got this fancy video projection system that I already hate, and a step-by-step instructions on the wall are full of errors, and it was a struggle to get connected at all, and then the sound feedback was so horrid that I just gave up and shut it all down and just used words and gestures to communicate. How primitive.

Then I called our tech help to get assistance and get this damned thing working for the next day. I called the number on the wall to the Morris campus help desk, and who picks up? Some helpful guy at the Twin Cities campus, 150 miles away, who wasn’t familiar with our system. He tried to connect me to Morris, but it just looped back to circle around to the Twin Cities again. Three times. Phones, what are they good for anyway?

I am now the proud possessor of a numbered help ticket…to assistance at the Twin Cities. Man, I hope they don’t mind taking a 3 hour drive to help a professor with presentation technology. Otherwise, I’m going to be doing everything with chalk.

So how’s your day going? Getting a good start on the Fall term?

(Also, it’s true: none of the students wear a mask to class. Just me.)

Well, with evidence like that…

Currently, I’m one of the rare weirdos at my university wearing a mask. I’ll be wearing it when I teach. I’m mystified by the reluctance of administrators to follow simple, painless health rules.

Maybe it’s because so many doctors are saying it’s unnecessary, sort of, like this op-ed from a doctor in the Washington Post. She’s abandoning masking her kids for the strangest reasons.

I accept the risk that my kids will probably contract covid-19 this school year, just as they could contract the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other contagious diseases. As for most Americans, covid in our family will almost certainly be mild; and, like most Americans, we’ve made the decision that following precautions strict enough to prevent the highly contagious BA.5 will be very challenging. Masking has harmed our son’s language development, and limiting both kids’ extracurriculars and social interactions would negatively affect their childhood and hinder my and my husband’s ability to work.

So no more masks because she is resigned to the fact that her kids will get a potentially debilitating, even deadly disease? Meh, if COVID doesn’t kill them, something else will, so don’t bother protecting them. It’ll be challenging, but not challenging enough to make an effort. Besides, it would mean not turning out for baseball or dance class, and most importantly, might hinder Mom & Dad’s ability to work!

Hint: if that’s what worries you, don’t have kids. That’s what kids do.

But then, I was interested in the one concrete thing she claims: Masking has harmed our son’s language development. It’s got a link that I presumed must point to a study demonstrating that specific problem, but no, it’s a news story about growing calls to take masks off children in school. It’s a collection of anecdotes about anti-masking people complaining about how hard it is to keep a mask on their kids, and claiming, like the doctor above that it is hampering their language or even smothering their empathy. It mentions (but does not cite) one German psychiatrist, Manfred Spitzer, who claims all kinds of deleterious consequences of using a mask, but this is also a guy who argues that children should be banned from having a cell phone until they’re 18. And then, this:

Diane Paul is with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the national professional association representing speech therapists. She says referrals of children to speech therapy have increased since the pandemic began.

But, Paul adds, there are no studies to prove — or disprove — that this is due to masking rather than, as she believes, the lingering effects of remote learning and other factors of the pandemic.

Is it hard to keep a kid masked? Sometimes, no denying it. Does it cause little problems? Sure.

But I will deploy my own anecdote to counter that: my granddaughter, Iliana, has been living under the cloud of the pandemic for practically her entire life. She cheerfully puts on a mask — it’s a fashion accessory, it’s the grown-up thing to do — and toddles off to the store with mom and dad without complaint.

Also, she is extremely vocal and will chatter away non-stop, with no real speech impediment.

Checkmate, anti-maskers. Put the damn thing on and do everything you can to protect your child from disease. Why is that even in question?

God-bothering violent fool was temporarily restrained

There’s the question I’d ask.

“Andrew Who?” That’s most of what the over-30 crowd said in response to the news that Andrew Tate had been banned from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook after a spate of negative coverage and increasing concerns from parents and teachers about the TikTok star’s power over his followers. For adults who don’t have teenage sons, the 35-year-old kickboxer-turned-TikTok star was largely unknown, but as anyone in the high school and college age set could tell you, online he was an overnight sensation.

Admittedly, I’d heard of him second hand as a terrible trollish asshole, but I’d never seen any of his videos, so I’m glad Amanda Marcotte explained it. The big question, though, is how does a loudmouthed ignorant jerk become an overnight sensation? Amanda answers that, too.

His popularity is directly attributable to the profit motives of social media companies. As the Guardian demonstrated, if a TikTok user was identified as a teenage male, the service shoveled Tate videos at him at a rapid pace. Until the grown-ups got involved and shut it all down, Tate was a cash cow for TikTok, garnering over 12 billion views for his videos peddling misogyny so vitriolic that one almost has to wonder if he’s joking.

Oh.

I’m sure the executives behind those kinds of decisions are all cowering behind the smokescreen of the mysterious “algorithm”, but they wrote the code for that crap and fed it the data, and you’re telling me that they never noticed that their software was running amok and spewing bad recommendations all over the place? Nah, I don’t believe it. More likely there was the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley dudebros enthusiastically priming the system with the kind of videos they like to watch — a mob of James Damore wanna-bes — and it took off in a way that the grown-ups had to notice. They noticed the cash flowing into their pockets, anyway.

Parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the wellbeing of young people should be worried. It’s not just that Tate was spreading hateful ideas and encouraging violence against women, though that on its own is terrifying enough. It’s that Tate is just the latest example of the way that far-right figures lure in young men by preying on their insecurities. Once the influencers suck in these young men, they start redirecting audience energies towards fascist organizing. Tate is just a piece of a larger puzzle that explains, for instance, how so many otherwise normal young men get wrapped up in groups like the Proud Boys and actions like storming the Capitol on January 6.

The strategy is simple. Far-right online influencers position themselves as “self-help” gurus, ready to offer advice on making money, working out, or, crucially, attracting female attention. But it’s a bait-and-switch. Rather than getting good advice on money or health, audiences often are hit with pitches for cryptocurrency scams or useless-but-expensive supplements. And, even worse, rather than being offered genuine guidance on how to be more appealing to women, they’re encouraged to blame women — and especially feminism — for their dating woes.

There has to be more to it than just a pied piper leading adolescent boys to their doom, though. I was an adolescent boy, once, and I would have been repelled by my fellow boys “saying shit like women are inferior to men, women belong in the kitchen, and refusing to read an article by a female author because women should only be housewives.” I’m not saying I wasn’t impressionable and stupid at a young age, but that there are some kinds of messages I would have rejected instantly. There’s got to be some other ingredient in the recipe to make a right-wing tool.

By the way, Andrew Tate himself might be banned, but TikTok and YouTube are stuffed to the gills with Andrew Tate videos — his acolytes have been busy duplicating and uploading copies of his videos everywhere…and none of the services profiting off them will do a thing about it. Kent Hovind could be sent to prison for ten years, and still his lies continued to proliferate. Expect Tate to thrive in the same virtual way. He’ll be back. Or some vicious little copy of him will be.

This Theme Park Evangelist is not going to be popular with Ken Ham

Answers in Genesis has opened a shiny new attraction, The Journey of the Animals Carousel. It is what it sounds like, a carousel with different fiberglas (I assume) animals that goes around and around. That’s it.

This guy who calls himself the Theme Park Evangelist was very enthused, and called it exciting and unique in a video about it. It’s neither.

While gushing, though, he spilled a lot of the truth about it.

it has not had a lot of people on it yet: correct. It reflects my experience with the place: a whole lot of real estate with what may be, in aggregate, a substantial crowd, but everyone looks lost and scattered in it.

it sounds like Jurassic Park: oh, he noticed. They try very hard to rip off more popular intellectual properties, so they play a Jurassic Park sound-alike theme. There’s no originality here.

it’s got pictures all over the walls: there is no intrinsic didactic purpose to a carousel, but this is supposed to be an evangelical display, so they scatter plaques and posters on the walls to explain Jesus’ purpose. Which get ignored. The inside of the Ark is similar, the fake boat is there to provide convenient wall space for signage.

there’s no AC in here whatsoever: unsurprising. It’s a cheap outfit, all about providing a facade.

I do wonder what Ken Ham will think of this video made with the intent of promoting the Ark Park, but which only succeeds in making it look boring?

Be like Bertrand Russell, not Oswald Mosely

A reader sent me this rather affirming quote from Bertrand Russell, in which he refuses to debate the old fascist, Oswald Mosely.

Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letters and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell

I note that so many of the debate channels are begging for people to participate, and they usually start with bringing in creationists of flat earthers or such trash to take one side, and can then find others willing to take the reasonable side. It’s not necessarily “cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution” in the beginning, but still, by joining in, you’re contributing to the popularity of pernicious ignorance.

I’ve also noticed that that’s only the start — those channels, in their desperate straining for increasing sensationalism, always seem to end up bringing fascists and racists on. Would you believe I saw a video with Richard Spencer arguing for evolution? That was such a shit show I couldn’t bear it. Bertrand Russell would have wept. That’s the direction these pro-debate groups are going, milking profit off their ability to convince people to step into the ring with some terrible nobody. They are the modern equivalent of bum fights, and they are all morally reprehensible.

Just say no to debates.