Giveaways incoming!

I’ve been held up by mobility problems lately, but I’m trying to get the things resolved and shipped out today. I can’t send out a couple of books until I get some addresses!

For Giveaway #1, logicalcat needs to email me a shipping address for the cell biology book!

For Giveaway #2, the winners are:

JoDee for the cancer text

ANB for the development text

NO ONE has spoken up for the neuro book! It’s not too late, let me know in the comments here.

Recipients should email me with a shipping address!

I’ll be posting Giveaway #3 tomorrow.

I was silent

Could he look more like a sleazy dirtbag? Maybe that’s what they mean by “authentic.”

To make excuses for myself, it was a court case, and my perspective wouldn’t have made a difference — I’d have just been one of the thousands or more yammering on the internet about a trial. I’d been through this before, in the OJ Simpson case, where the cacophony of noise did not contribute to justice, but almost certainly skewed the fickle court of public opinion in unfavorable ways.

I’m speaking of the Amber Heard trial, which was decided yesterday in favor of Johnny Depp. I’ve avoided news of the case because enough snippets had leaked through to leave me sickened. On YouTube and social media, it was made clear that Depp was the affable rogue who made light of Heard’s case; Heard, on the other hand, was the conniving sociopath who could turn on the waterworks at an instant’s notice, and then, moments later, revert to stone-faced heartless bitch. Obviously, she was lying. Obviously, Captain Jack Sparrow was a misunderstood rascal.

Except…whenever I watched a clip of the trial, what I saw was a woman in pain, controlling herself because she didn’t want to play into the public perception of women as hysterical, while Depp was just an asshole. Even more poisonous was the Depp camp, which seemed to consist largely of the usual bros who were gleeful about an opportunity to shriek insults at a woman while not getting the usual social opprobrium. It was a repulsive spectacle. While I averted my eyes and avoided the trial news as much as I could, Rebecca Watson dug deeper, and I agree fully with her take.

Now the case has been settled. Depp won. This is going to have serious consequences.

…on Wednesday after a jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found Amber Heard guilty of defaming Depp in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she identified herself as a public face of domestic abuse survivors, without explicitly naming Depp. Despite presenting photos of her injuries, video recordings of Depp’s meltdowns, and witness testimony supporting her claims of abuse, Depp was awarded $10 million plus $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million for winning one point in her countersuit.

But in truth, the highly publicized trial was decided in the court of public opinion weeks ago. As it played out over the last few weeks, with people on social media overwhelmingly aligning with the beloved Pirates of the Caribbean star, millions of stans and even brands and celebrities have excoriated Heard and accused her of fabricating the allegations against Depp, causing hashtags like #AmberTurd and #JusticeForJohnnyDepp to trend worldwide.

“This is basically the end of MeToo,” Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the death of the whole movement.”

As the verdict came in, sexual assault survivors expressed their disappointment with the decision, even if they were not surprised by it. “I don’t think it’s unexpected. But it’s horrible,” says one survivor, who herself faced a defamation claim after coming forward against her own abuser (and requested her name be withheld for legal reasons). She says the claim was dropped, but that watching Heard be dragged through the mud during the trial brought back memories of her own experience, which she says was traumatic and led her to consider suicide.

“I feel really glad to think my case didn’t go ahead. And stupid to think I could have won it,” she says. “Men always win.”

And I kept my mouth shut throughout. I’m always disappointing myself.

Rebecca didn’t mention the one case that impressed me with her point, that I mentioned at the beginning: the “trial of the century”, the OJ Simpson murder trial, which OJ won, because “Men always win.” Even after brutally chopping up Nicole Brown Simpson, he got off.

Well, sort of.

We all knew he did it, and his behavior after the trial confirmed it. His career in movies was dead, and you can’t even watch his old movies anymore without cringing deeply. I’m sure not going to watch a Naked Gun movie, ever again. It’s a similar situation now; knowing that Johnny Depp is a wife-beating arrogant dudebro means I’m not going to ever be able to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or any movie starring Depp, without feeling a little bit of disgust at the main character.

Not that that could be the slightest consolation to Amber Heard or especially Nicole Brown Simpson. At least Heard has escaped without being stabbed to death. This verdict makes it a little less likely that other victims of domestic abuse will get away with their lives.

Thank god for James Stephanie Sterling

I’m a pathetic excuse for a gamer — I’m not very good at the vidyagames, especially not the ones that require fast twitch reflexes — but still, I have to watch all of James Stephanie Sterling’s videos about games and the gaming industry. Watch this one and you’ll see why — let’s all call out those cowards everywhere who whine about not being political, not realizing that the luxury of pretending to shun political positions is in and of itself a political position.

I totally agree that one of the defining characteristics of conservative and centrist liberals is craven cowardice, desperately hiding from the consequences of their bad ideas.

A curious omission

Kirk Cameron is trying hard to be relevant again. He’s been making more noise about the wickedness of our secular culture and how the schools are bad.

Cameron takes issue with the perspective that a child’s education should be left solely to the so-called experts, without parents’ input. “And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at. Who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children? Is it the parents or is it the government?”

He went on to strongly criticize “those who are rotting out the minds and souls of America’s children” and said they were “spreading a terminal disease, not education.”

“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love for our great country: critical race theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether they want to be a boy or a girl, The 1619 Project,” he said.

Notice what he left out? The thing he is most famous for, besides making very bad movies? He doesn’t complain about science and evolution. He appeared in that infamous banana video with Ray Comfrot. Cameron is clearly trying to extend his ghastly influence beyond his usual gang of demented evangelicals to demented generic far right loons. There is a lot of overlap in those two categories, but he seems to be aware that getting specific about his crazy beliefs is going to be a deal breaker for some narrow subset of potential followers. Vague discontent is much more marketable.

I want the next person to interview him to ask him about bananas.

Are you arguing that genetics supports your racism?

The American Society for Human Genetics begs to differ.

As the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) joins others in deepest sorrow and outrage over the unfathomable recent tragedies in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, the human genetics community is appalled at the news that the shooter in the hate-fueled mass killing in Buffalo rooted his racist beliefs by misusing and misrepresenting the science we strive to advance each day. As we have in 2018 and again in 2020, the human genetics community rejects in the strongest possible terms any attempt to twist and warp genetics knowledge to advance bogus racist ideology or try to legitimize through science the fundamental hatred that forms white supremacy’s evil core.

The fundamental fact from human genetics is this: the human genome tells the profoundly powerful story of a single humanity – one species able to thrive by adapting in subtle but important ways to our environmental and evolutionary forces over thousands of years in every corner of the planet. That variation is an enormous and profound strength and is central to efforts to understand and apply this knowledge to serve humanity.

As scientists and citizens in this one humanity, it is our duty to condemn falsehoods that enflame violence and to champion scientific knowledge and fact. ASHG’s hearts, minds and long-term goals remain fully committed to advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in science, health and society.

Genetics is far messier than most people know, so a good rule of thumb is to question simple answers.

Slippery slope to stupid

This woman is deeply, painfully stupid.


She seems to think there is some biological trend. There isn’t. Heterosexuality will always be common, and so will homosexuality.

Except, here’s the future liberals want: everyone is free to choose whom to love without shame or punishment. Kids are free to explore who they want to be, without their church or the government dictating which subset of the populace they are allowed to form loving relationships with; boys can love boys, boys can love girls, girls can love girls, girls can love boys, boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and if they don’t find fulfillment in sexual relationships, they can do something else. All the people who get pregnant will be those who want babies. Families will come in all flavors, and no one will find it at all unusual, let alone want to tell other people how they are supposed to live.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful if no one were “straight” anymore, in the Marjorie Taylor Greene sense of the word: compelled to live in a narrow little box, no matter what their heart tells them. That does not imply that heterosexuality will be discouraged or punished, although the MJTs of the world will always project and think that what they do to minorities is what will happen to them.

It’s Memorial Day?

What is it? I’m an American, I forget.

No, I kid. Of course I know what it is. It’s the day we commemorate all the soldiers who died brutal, bloody deaths in vicious wars in order to give us a three day weekend.

I guess here in Morris we also get a benediction and brunch out of their sacrifice. Woo hoo. All I can say is that I have a son in the army, the USA better not ever give me an excuse to visit a grave.

The Flood problem, illustrated by Oglaf

What? By Oglaf? And it’s entirely safe for work? Yep.

You don’t get to postulate a globe-spanning catastrophic flood that demolishes everything on the land and simply assume that fish will be unaffected. Every aquarist knows fish are profoundly affected by things like salinity, pH, elements like phosphates, etc. We don’t usually have to worry about violent churning and silt, fortunately, but in Noah’s flood you would.

I hadn’t thought about the potatoes, and most plants, in fact, but they also wouldn’t tolerate the massive disruption caused by the Christian magic flood story.

Of course, if you accept the metaphor, myth, and poetry theory, all the problems go away.

The Great Spider Heist

One of my colleague has a lovely compost bin in their back yard. Or should I say, “had”. They’re leaving our fair campus for a new job in the big city of Madison, which caused me some worry — not just for losing a good contributor in the science & math division, but because, as I’ve reported before, their compost bin has a magnificent colony of Steatoda borealis thriving inside it. Nobody ever asks, “what about the spiders?” when they leave.
So Mary and I…ummm…”appropriated” the compost bin. Don’t worry, I asked permission first, and it has now been relocated to our yard. Just outside our door, where I can check on them regularly.
Is it not beautiful?

It was a disruptive process for many of the spiders. The bottom is open, so hoisting it up meant losing much of the compost inside, but we shoveled up much of it and restocked the bin. No doubt we lost some spiders in the move, but they mainly live in the tangle of webbing inside the lid, not in the compost itself. Lots of egg sacs were still there.

And of course, many agitated spiders scurrying about on the lid.

They live on the small insects that emerge from the decaying compost, and survive the winter on the warmth of the fermenting organic matter, so I threw in some old potatoes I’d been saving for this occasion. We’ll also be much more careful to toss food waste in there, to keep the spiders happy.
We’ll also rename the bin the Atkinson Home for Hungry Spiders, in honor of my colleague.
Although, I don’t understand why he didn’t want to pack up such a gorgeous box full of joy to bring to his new home.

This story has also been posted to Patreon, and I’ll post occasional updates on the status of the happy spider family there.