This was amusing. A graduate of the Lenski lab got into a conversation with a couple of creationists about — would you believe? — the Lenski experiment. They argued with him about the results of the experiment! Of course, the creationists learned nothing.
Gutsick Gibbon provides some commentary, in particular explaining how creationists don’t even understand the concept of fitness.
Now he only wants to buy it to ban photos like this one.
How exciting! The court hearing in which Twitter argues for a fast-track trial, while Musk begs for time to dawdle and make jokes and trash-talk is happening right this minute!
Twitter Inc’s (TWTR.N) showdown with Elon Musk over his $44 billion takeover faces its first test on Tuesday, when a judge will weigh the company’s bid for a fast-tracked trial which it says it needs to ensure deal financing doesn’t come unraveled.
The San Francisco-based company is seeking to resolve months of uncertainty for its business as Musk tries to walk away from the deal over what he says are Twitter’s “spam” accounts that he says are fundamental to its value.
Wait, did I say “exciting”? I don’t think that’s the right word for a sense of dread combined with disgust at billionaires. Is there a good word for that? It would be very useful.
I think I want Twitter to win this round, so that the agony isn’t prolonged, and so Musk gets a preliminary slap in the face. But I don’t want Musk to be compelled to buy Twitter, because he’d just wreck it worse than it already is. The ideal ultimate solution would be if eventually Musk is let off the hook but has to pay a tremendous “fuck around and find out” penalty: a few billion to Twitter, and many billions more to public service, like a windfall to public libraries, for instance. Just dreaming here.
@Kolyin is live tweeting the hearing, if you want to follow along.
The hearing is over. The judge essentially decided in favor of Twitter, scheduling the big battle for 5 days in October. Man, I wish the lawsuit against us could have been resolved so speedily (yeah, that’s speedy for a trial.)
Because this is how you get vampires.
Officials were at first bewildered when they came upon a mysterious ghost ship with no captain or crew on board that had washed ashore on a secluded island off the coast of Cambodia during an intense storm this week.
Cambodian vampires are a little different from the European kind, though: they consist of a floating head with the viscera dangling down below. They are supposed to look like a young and beautiful woman, but an isolated head with a bunch of guts hanging from the neck is a little bit offputting.
Oh boy! They’re making “NFT the Movie”, which I presume is going to be something like the emoji movie, only with lower production values and more obfuscation. For example…
Although the video is titled “What’s an NFT?” they never quite get around to explaining it. It has a couple of crypto bros rattling off bizarre buzzwords, with a narration by Brittany Kaiser, “award winning documentarist/NFT expert”. I had to look her up. She was the former business director for Cambridge Analytica (alarm bells should be ringing). IMDB doesn’t find any documentaries made by Kaiser, but she was a central figure in one of them, The Great Hack. I haven’t seen it, so I’ll have to go by the reviewers’ comments.
Interesting to see how it all works, but my beef with the flick is the one-sided view of one of the main characters in Kaiser.
Plain to see that this is a person with little to no moral compass, that happily did what she did to hobnob and feel important/to make an impact. When it was apparent that the sky was falling, she happily turned “whistleblower” and spilled everything she could on operations. I failed to see her show any remorse for the work she did in setting up the whole infrastructure over 3.5+ years. Yet throughout the film she is portrayed as being free from blame and just a source of information, when she clearly sold her soul to make money and for other purposes known only to her. The film-makers almost portray her as a victim and instead of asking the hard questions, appear to be content to play best friend.
She’s promoting NFTs — lack of moral compass confirmed!
When will people wise up? It doesn’t help that people are making “movies” about this grift, but maybe it’ll help that the movie will be cheesy and incomprehensible, and will bomb.
Nice library. Shame if something were to happen to it.
Here’s a great example of the chaos the right wing has brought down upon us, local libraries.
Residents of a small Iowa town criticized their library’s LGBTQ staff and their displaying of LGBTQ-related books until most of the staff quit. Now, the town’s library is closed for the foreseeable future.
After having the same library director for 32 years, the Vinton Public Library can’t seem to keep the position filled anymore. Since summer 2021, the Vinton Public Library has gone through two permanent directors and an interim director who has served in that role twice.
Located about 40 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, the doors of the Vinton Public Library—housed in a brick and stone Carnegie—have been open to the public since 1904, but were shuttered on Friday, July 8, while the Vinton Library Board tries to sort out staffing issues seemingly brought on by local dalliances with the national culture wars.
It comes after a handful of locals whipped up a controversy first over the library displaying books about prominent Democrats, and later about it displaying LGBTQ books and having LGBTQ people on staff.
See? All it takes is a handful of local assholes to deprive an entire community of a valuable resource. Notice that the incident initially prompting this problem was displaying books about Democrats, which, last I heard, was still a legal political party.
I read through quite a few articles on this subject, and noticed a curious thing: while defenders of the library were named, none of the names of the people are brought up. All it is is librarians and others announcing that they can’t take it anymore, that they have to resign and get out of this sick town. At best we see phrases like “a handful of locals”.
Who are they? There has been an effective policy of harassment and abuse that has decimated the staff and made it impossible to keep the library open. GODDAMN IT, NAME THEM. This is asymmetric warfare where the oppressive forces get to thrive in concealment, an anonymity maintained by the media, while they get to assail the civic infrastructure. There is a serious problem flourishing in Vinton, Iowa, and everyone is pretending that the closure just happened passively. No. It was a targeted attack. Somebody organized it. Someone made harassing phone calls, or wrote abusive letters to the editor of the local paper, or denied employees service at the grocery store or pharmacy or whatever.
In the absence of any clarity here, I guess I’m just going to assume it was some vile conservative church. They’re usually the ones trying to impose their will on small towns. Given that Vinton, Iowa has a population of about 5,000, like Morris, and has at least 14 churches, I think that’s a safe bet.
I watched a bit of this video from Answers in Genesis, but couldn’t take much of it. Daniel Phelps had more stamina, and watched the hacks at AiG spout their BS about the shiny new space telescope. Danny Faulkner is their pet astronomer who rejects most of astronomy.
Their response was by AiG’s astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner, and their “rocket scientist,” Rob Webb. Their discussion was a rather weak critique of the JWST’s findings and funny and sad at the same time. Through most of their simulcast, one couldn’t hear what the NASA people were saying, but this may have been a technical difficulty. About 23 minutes in Dr. Faulkner and Webb bizarrely claim that light year distances don’t necessarily equal long time scales (thus not refuting a 6,000 year old universe). Soon after, Dr. Faulkner states his “theory” (not a scientific theory, but he doesn’t seem to know this) that we can see things billions of light years away in a 6,000 year old universe because of a “miracle.” His position is literally “then a miracle occurred.” This is reminiscent of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon found here:. Dr. Faulkner goes on to say that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden saw pretty much what we see today when looking at the night sky.
They do know that the Harris cartoon is not a recommendation, right? As soon as you resort to “miracles”, you’ve left science behind.
Not that that would bother AiG.
Dumbass wannabe martyr
This is the time of year many of us are working on our syllabi, and one common feature nowadays is a land acknowledgment. For instance, I mention that UMM is on the original homelands of the Dakota, Lakota and Anishinaabe peoples; no big deal, recognizing our history and the identity of the people who have a legitimate claim on these lands. But what would you think of this peculiar acknowledgement by a computer science instructor at the University of Washington?
I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.
Labor theory of property? What does that have to do the brute fact of the reality of UW’s history? Then denying that fact is simply offensive.
The university asked him to take it down. They even offer a recommended alternative.
The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.
It’s very silly to oppose a straightforward statement of fact like that, and offensive to post a denial. But Stuart Reges sees an opportunity to leap on the right-wing gravy train.
“University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them,” said Reges in a press release issued Wednesday by FIRE, a nonprofit that supports free speech on campuses and elsewhere. “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court,” added Reges.
That’s it. The university asked an employee to refrain from offending students, which is entirely reasonable — academic freedom does not mean you can posture abusively and not be criticized. He has a job to do, and a meaningless but unproductive statement does interfere with that.
Of course, he is now suing the university, claiming his civil rights have been violated, which is why he’s partnering up with FIRE. Nothing has happened to him, except that his own actions have generated some adverse publicity; the university has not taken any material action against him. He’s not tenured, so the university is free to not renew his contract. I don’t understand what grounds he has for any kind of lawsuit. He’s just trying desperately to become yet another right-wing martyr, but the university hasn’t bothered to nail him up on any cross.
Of course, now he’s stuck his head up and made it obvious to the administration how stupid he is. He may have effectively screwed himself.
He’s tried this before. Would you believe he he published an article on Quillette, Why Women Don’t Code, in which he says I believe that women are less likely than men to want to major in computer science and less likely to pursue a career as a software engineer and that this difference between men and women accounts for most of the gender gap
, and also tried to hoist himself on that cross again:
Saying controversial things that might get me fired is nothing new for me. I’ve been doing it most of my adult life and usually my comments have generated a big yawn. I experienced a notable exception in a 1991 case that received national attention, when I was fired from Stanford University for “violating campus drug policy” as a means of challenging the assumptions of the war on drugs. My attitude in all of these cases has been that I need to speak up and give my honest opinion on controversial issues. Most often nothing comes of it, but if I can be punished for expressing such ideas, then it is even more important to speak up and try to make the injustice plain.
Try and try and try again to provoke your employers so you can land that juicy lawsuit that will please the regressives who hate universities, and fail and fail and fail. That Quillette article did have the effect of getting his three-year contract getting demoted to a one year probationary contract. “Contract”. “Probationary”. That he has been straining to violate the terms of a probationary agreement for years seems to me to provide adequate grounds for letting him go while cancelling out any reason to sue his employers.
the other thing the interns did: the producers would be like “hey, we wanna say raspberries cure cancer. prove that“ and then the med students would look at all the chemicals in raspberries, and then find ONE article saying that ONE chemical MAY help. and then they’d air it
— soul nate (@MNateShyamalan) July 17, 2022
No, we are not.
Even without Fetterman’s highly effective campaign, this kind of quackery is why I don’t want Oz in the senate. He’s a dishonest fraud. So is Dr Phil. In fact, any of the stable of goofballs squirted out of the gullible brain of Oprah ought to be rejected if ever they appear on any political slate.
I’ve been tracking the growth of individuals in my Steatoda triangulosa colony, and finally have a whole 3 time points so I can estimate the spider growth rate. Behold, the first preliminary chart!
The line is a linear fit, which is not likely to be what I see in the end, but it’s optimistic, and I can’t really make many assumptions with so little data. But OK, if aiming to raise these spiders to a length of 1 meter, that’ll only take, with that assumption, about…a century? Yikes.
That rate is perfectly appropriate if they max out at 10mm long, like their mommy, but it’s going to be hard to take over the world with tiny little spiders like that. I guess I’ll have to go for numbers.
There is a spider, Araneus mitificus, AKA the Kidney Garden spider, that sort of vaguely resembles the mascot (?) of Pringles potato chips. Surprisingly, the Kellog company, which markets Pringles, has embraced this idea and want to make the name “Pringles Spider” official.
There’s a petition and a website. If the name change is approved, which they think they can do by persuading “the decision maker” with enough signatures, the first 1500 signatories get one free can of potato chips. Who is the “decision maker”? They don’t know.
Pringles has added a petition to Change.org with the hopes that the International Society of Arachnology, the American Arachnological Society, and other organizations will “do what’s right and recognize this very real spider as the Pringles Spider.”
How awkward. The American Arachnological Society does not determine nomenclature, neither does International Society of Arachnology. You can send all the requests you want to them, and they’re just going to give you the side-eye and block you as spam. There is an International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, but they have very strict rules about the assignment of binomial nomenclature, you aren’t going to change that. Common names are vague and often lazily defined by usage; you can call it the “Pringles spider” if you want, but it has no official weight.
There is absolutely nothing preventing Pringles from putting a photo of Araneus mitificus on all of their packaging and happily calling it the Pringles Spider. They could also make commercials with a smiling anthropomorphized spider touting their product, and get rid of the mustachioed cartoon man altogether. They don’t need a petition for any of that!
Go ahead, Pringles. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
