One shining ray of light in the new UK government

There’s one less pompous supercilious twit in the cabinet — in a snit, Jacob Rees-Mogg has quit before he could be fired.

The move comes despite Mr Rees-Mogg suggesting he would be ‘open’ to a job in Mr Sunak’s cabinet. In u-turn on previous criticism of the new PM, he told the Telegraph today that he no longer considered Mr Sunak “a socialist.” He added that the Conservative party should unite around the new leader.

But these overtures have not been enough and Mr Rees-Mogg – who was a close ally of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – has left the government today.

He did make me laugh with his exit. Rishi Sunak, a man with hundreds of millions of pounds, a socialist?

From Dickens to Wodehouse to the Goons to Monty Python, Britain has always been a source of great comedy. Somebody needs to inform the people that you’re not supposed to elect the buffoons to high office, though.

I get comments

Somebody who calls himself Truth Matters, who has been telling me I’m chicken for refusing to debate criminal creep Kent Hovind, now is trying the pity approach.

dude I feel sorry for you, you are messing with the wrong God. A square inch on your skin is more complex than every building throughout all history and everything we have ever created including the internet combined. The Bible mentions hydrothermal vents thousands of years ago and you know that the didn’t have submarines back then. You still have some time left I suggest you pray to Jesus and ask Him to save you or else you are going to be judged (and nobody paid for your sins so guess who is going to pay for your)

Expressing my contempt for Kent Hovind is not messing with the wrong God. I might suggest that he stop worshipping a certain false god, though.

The complexity argument is not an argument for a deity — it’s an argument that supports my claim that biology is a product of a long trial-and-error process over millions of years, which would produce the details we observe. Claiming it was all made by divine fiat is an unconvincing copout.

Not in the Bible

The Bible does not mention hydrothermal vents. I think he’s referring to the fountains of the deep that spurted huge volumes of water to flood the Earth. Moses didn’t see those, and if they were the source of the flood waters, Noah would have been cooked and poisoned.

The concept that Christians can sin because a religious fanatic was murdered 2000 years ago is one of the most perniciously evil ideas Christianity ever invented. It’s the source of the arrogance this kind of person exhibits — and it’s ironic that his messiah preached humility.

Nope. I’m not going to debate that wretched cretin, Hovind.

Things you never knew about water

I think I poisoned my brain on Sunday reading these claims about different phases of water. Or, at least, I poisoned my Google algorithms because now this crap keeps gurgling up.

Here’s one that’s so over-the-top it was almost amusing, except that it’s a commercial site using ludicrous claims about biology to sell miracle water.

Dr. Gerald Pollack is a biomedical engineering research scientist from the University of Washington that discovered a new state of water beyond liquid, solid and vapor. H3O2, sometimes called gel water, structured water or exclusion zone water (EZ water), is in between a solid and a liquid. An extra hydrogen molecule and an extra oxygen molecule make it silkier than H2O. This matters because that 70 – 90% you’ve heard about in your body is actually H3O2. That’s why water doesn’t come gushing out of you like a hose if you get a cut. Your cells are full of the thicker, H3O2.

Oooh, silkier. How do they measure that? Also cool that they think I’d turn into a firehose if I only contained normal water.

Water in nature is naturally structured even though you can’t see any form in it. At a molecular level, under a microscope water has shapes that are organized in geometric patterns. Spring water, waterfalls and glaciers are structured. And the water in fruits and vegetables is naturally structured. What Dr. Gerald Pollack has revealed to us is that if we want to get our bodies into alignment with nature and health, we need to be thinking about hydration with structured water.

Yes. Put water under a microscope and you’ll be able to see the geometric patterns. I guess it’s supposed to look like this:

If your water looks nothing like that, you can buy a tube full of quartz crystals that will structure your tap water for the low, low, low price of only $1799.

Man, this is an amazing racket.

Is this really the best way to illustrate world population?

This chart is very pretty and colorful, but all it’s really doing is plotting a single variable, population size, against the arbitrary names of political subunits. It’s hard to read and difficult to extract any information about relationships from it. I think the creators need to go back and re-read (or read for the first time?) Edward Tufte.

This is what you get when someone is told to make some visual candy that really pops, rather than to transform information into a visual medium. My eyes are simultaneously stimulated and offended.

One way to be Less Wrong is to avoid faulty premises

While I was digging into the question of who this Gilbert Ling character was, I ran into lots of sources that didn’t make the final cut. Unfortunately, most of those sources were from fringe or unsavory places — I did check my collection of textbooks, too, and nowhere does he get any mention. So it’s down into the sewers after all! Like this article on Less Wrong.

The Association-Induction hypothesis formulated by Gilbert Ling is an alternate view of cell function, which suggests a distinct functional role of energy within the cell. I won’t review it in detail here, but you can find an easy to understand and comprehensive introduction to this hypothesis in the book “Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life” by Gerald H. Pollack. This idea has a long history with considerable experimental evidence, which is too extensive to review in this article.

No, it has a 70 year history all centered on the long-winded writings of a single crackpot. There is no experimental evidence for any of it other than the willful distortions of one Gilbert Ling. Pollack is utterly batty, and not a credible source.

Worse still, this guy is using Ling’s theories as a starting point for discussing how we can use this information to potentially increase IQ.

So this suggests a ‘systems biology’ approach to cognitive enhancement. It’s necessary to consider how metabolism is regulated, and what substrates it requires. To raise intelligence in a safe and effective way, all of these substrates must have increased availability to the neuron, in appropriate ratios.

I am always leery of drawing analogies between brains and computers but this approach to cognitive enhancement is very loosely analogous to over-clocking a CPU. Over-clocking requires raising both the clock rate, and the energy availability (voltage). In the case of the brain, the effective ‘clock rate’ is controlled by hormones (primarily triiodothyronine aka T3), and energy availability is provided by glucose and other nutrients.

Oh god. Nerds discussing overly simplistic analogies between brains and computers always makes me leery, too, so just stop already. Especially when your ‘over-clocking’ idea is built on a bogus model of cellular metabolism that has been known to be wrong for the entirety of its “long history”.

I know I started this by dissing the Less Wrong forum, but I will say that, to their credit, most of the commenters were tearing that article apart.

You’re probably as tired of hearing about Sviggum as I am

At least this article focuses on the perspective of the students — they’re pissed off. But hey, I recognized a bunch of the students they highlighted!

I also think one student made a particularly good point. Paradoxically, with great diversity comes great isolation.

Mercedese Young Man said she often feels alone on the campus and in the western Minnesota town.

“I feel isolated,” said Young Man, who is in her first semester at Morris. “Before (Sviggum) said all of that I was going to my counselors and telling them I was having a hard time adjusting to being here.”

Young Man, who sat for nearly an hour by herself in the school café seating area, said she transferred to Morris because of its supposed diversity, but she said that’s not the case. Officially Morris can boast of a robustly diverse population – 41% students of color, of that 32% Native American of a total student population of 1,068 – but Young Man disputed those numbers.

“There are just a handful of Native students here and all from separate tribes,” said Young Man, who is from Oglala, South Dakota. “In several of my classes I’m the only person … maybe one other … person of color.”

The raw statistics tends to lump all these students into one mass — “students of color” and “Native American” — but they all see themselves as something far more specific. I’ve known students who are Navajo and Delaware, as well as the regional Lakota and Dakota peoples. There are also Hmong and Somali and Nigerian and Latino and Filipino students here, and just sweeping them into a pile and calling them our diverse brown students is insulting and inadequate.

Bugger Sviggum, we should just listen to the students and follow their suggestions.

To the point of UMN Morris’ declining enrollment, Strukel and Kadlec may have unintentionally offered up a marketing campaign for the university.
“We’re unique here because we’re so separated from the fast-paced world. Here it’s who’s around you; that’s who you got,” said Kadlec. “There’s no Target or Walmart here to take my money so I’m forced to be here on campus with my friends; and that’s not bad at all.”

Self-care needs planning

If you’re wondering where I was this weekend, I was husbanding my strength by taking some time off. This is the time in the semester when everything comes pouring in — we’re past the halfway point, students have enough information to know where their grade stands, and some are panicking. The first midterms are well over, but another exam is looming on the horizon. We’re soon going to be handling spring term registration, and students have already been coming by my office for academic advising. The administrative duties are gathering — I’ve got two major evening committee meetings coming up this week, our review of our colleagues for tenure and promotion, which is no fun at all. Yay, meetings all day long followed by meetings in the evening!

Only about 6 weeks of the accelerating chaos to go. I can make it.

I’m also committing myself to getting some daily exercise, because I can tell my decrepitude is also increasing, and I have to start getting ready now for next summer’s spider season. Waiting until the last minute to try and get back in shape is always disastrous and leads to something breaking.

Has anyone started a betting pool on the new UK PM yet?

I know we should wait until the PM is actually appointed yet, or even be betting on who it will be (apparently, Rishi Sunak is the favorite), but I wanted to get in early on the betting for how long this one lasts before being discarded. I’d like to place a dollar on 69 days. I think Sunak is a little smarter than Truss, so he’ll hang on longer, but he’s a BoJo-adjacent Tory, so I’m pretty sure some scandal or stupidity will scuttle him eventually.

I guess he already has a head start.