A 10-minute summary of the war in Ukraine

He talks fast.

He’s fairly confident that Russia is in trouble and has failed in their major objectives, but he doesn’t say much about air power, and that seems to be Russia’s primary strength right now. You can’t take territory with planes, but you can effectively disrupt coordinated Ukrainian responses.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. The YouTuber seems pretty casual about the possibility of Putin using nukes, which is a scary (but unlikely? I hope?) possibility. All bets are off if Putin pushes the big red button, and hello WWIII.

I love weirding genetics

I recently finished discussing dosage compensation in my genetics class — you know, the way mammalian females tend to be mosaic for traits on the X chromosome because of the need to maintain a balanced dosage of gene expression for both males and females. The classic example is calico cats, which are almost always female, because the pigment gene on the X chromosome can be one of two forms, either a black allele or a yellow/orange allele, and if you’ve got two X chromosomes and are heterozygous the random inactivation of one X or the other produces a patchwork color. I hinted that there’s a way you can be a calico male, but I haven’t talked about that yet. We’ll get to chromosomal variations in a few weeks, and then I’ll give them this article to read.

The way you can get a calico male is if the cat is XXY. It’s male (usually — there are genetic variations that can change that, too!) by virtue of the Y chromosome, but it has two X chromosomes, so it also experiences randomized deactivation of one X or the other. This is just plain cool.

Except…would you believe people discriminate against cats with unusual chromosome arrangements? Of course you would. There are cat exhibitors who treat this male calico as some kind of freak. The article’s author visits a cat show to see Dawntreader Texas Calboy and his owner, Mistelle Stevenson.

I tell the people behind a registration table that I’m from D Magazine and ask where I might find an exhibitor by the name of Mistelle Stevenson.

“Oh, you’re probably here because of the calico,” says a gentleman with a helmet of silver hair, who I find out later is Mike Altschul, one of the weekend’s show managers. “Yeah, we weren’t too happy about that. She’s somewhere over there.” He flicks his hand toward a back corner. As I turn and start to walk away, he bellows after me, “You know, we don’t let three-legged cats in here either!”

I should have known then that I was stepping into some deep and dirty kitty litter.

WTF? He’s a lovely cat. And hey, why would you discriminate against three-legged cats? What’s wrong with these people?

(Note: I ask what’s wrong with these judgmental people, not what’s wrong with the cat. There is nothing wrong with the cat.)

There was nothing in the rulebook against showing male calicos, so Dawntreader Texas Calboy won a few shows, and was kicked out of a few. Then…they intentionally changed the rules to exclude him.

Then, before Calboy had another chance to compete, a sweeping addendum was made to Show Rule No. 30.01 at the CFA’s annual board meeting in February, officially making all “male cats whose color combinations occur only by virtue of genetic anomaly” ineligible from winning titles. Calboy was officially out of the competition. Stevenson was devastated. NBC 5 ran a story, which was quickly picked up by several outlets, including Newsweek. That was why, when I asked Stevenson if I could meet her at the Mesquite show in April, she said she’d be happy to talk, but Calboy would not be present. The climate was “a bit hostile.”

I’ve got news for these people. Every cat is unique, and therefore you can finagle the rules to judge any cat as a “genetic anomaly”.

As an added complication, when Dawntreader Texas Calboy grew up and became an adult, he started catting around and making kittens. This was unexpected: XXY individuals are usually sterile. Oops. So they had him tested. Another genetic surprise!

When the kittens arrived, their colors were all over the place. She wondered if maybe one of the kids let a male out of its room. There was only one way to know for sure. She swabbed the inside of Calboy’s cheek and sent it off to the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California, Davis for testing, along with samples from two different colored kittens. They told her the sample was contaminated; Calboy’s results showed two cats. She tried swabbing again, this time videotaping the process to prove the sample was uncontaminated. Again, the lab work showed two sets of DNA. Seeing that the variants on the genes were exactly the same, the lab was able to confirm: Calboy was a chimera.

This is going to be a beautiful example for my class. I’m grinding them through the canonical rules of classical genetics, but later I’ll have to explain that sometimes you have to pay attention to the enlightening exceptions, and it’s not always as simple as you might have been taught in high school biology.

Atheists for Liberty flying their colors

Atheists for Liberty, that horrid far-right reactionary organization, is now campaigning at CPAC. At long last, David Silverman (he’s on their advisory board) has got his wish, finding a front that will support his dream of an atheism that reeks of conservative values. Take a look at the books they are selling!

Those authors are all on their board of advisors, except Hitchens, who is dead. Also on board: Ron Lindsay, to my disappointment. They seem to be recruiting anyone who shows the slightest right-wing tendencies. I wonder why they haven’t invited me to join their board?

Also no surprise: they’ve gone anti-vax. Their argument is that there are religious exemptions, and rather than working to end them, they want to expand them to include atheist exemptions.

Hisss, boo

It wasn’t easy becoming a nasty wicked atheist…oh, who am I kidding. It was really, really easy. Obvious. Barely an inconvenience even. This short video premieres tonight at 6pm Central, follow the chat on YouTube. Bring rotten fruit and vegetables to pelt the ungodly.

Transcript down below, for those who like to read.

[Read more…]

Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb

There’s a new movie in town. Batman! The first Batman movie I saw was the 1966 version with Adam West. I thought it was wonderful. Still do.

Will this new one be as good? The second one I saw was in 1989, with my 5 year old son in tow.

The boy liked it, I enjoyed it, despite the controversy over casting Michael Keaton, he was excellent. It was grimmer, though.

There have been many Batman movies ever since, and they seem to demonstrate a terrible entropy, getting darker and grimmer and less enjoyable. It seems to be a trend.

I think I’m going to skip this one. The other movie playing in the Morris Theater is something called Dog. It looks rather less gritty and dark and grim and bleak. I might just go see that.

Three stupid sources ought to be an automatic rejection

I shouldn’t have even started drilling down to the source. I started at Answers in Genesis, a mistake I know, but at least the ridiculed (for the wrong reasons) the next article in the chain, which was in The Daily Mail. Here’s the Daily Mail headline:

Hey, how about if you demonstrate the existence of intelligent space-faring aliens before you start speculating about their motivations? But they’ve got a scientist who’s doing the speculating, and the Daily Mail loves scientists who agree with their biases.

Sci-fi films and TV shows have routinely depicted a brutal race of aliens visiting Earth in their spaceships and enslaving unfortunate Earthlings.

But according to one expert, extraterrestrial life may actually be too scared of ‘dangerous’ and ‘violent’ humans to want to come here.

Dr Gordon Gallup, a biopsychologist at the University of Albany, argues that humans are ‘dangerous, violent and ceaselessly engage in endless bloody conflicts and war’.

How do you become an expert in alien biopsychology, I’d like to know. We’re about to bottom out, though, since we’re about to learn where he published these claims.

Dr Gallup has presented his argument in an open access paper published in the Journal of Astrobiology this month.

Oh god. AiG, the Daily Mail, and the Journal of Astrobiology? Is this Dumpster Diving Friday or something? Have mercy. Here’s the abstract for the paper.

We evaluate claims for extraterrestrial intelligence based on the logic behind assertions such as the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To assess intelligence elsewhere in the universe we outline two of the principle scientific claims for intelligence on Earth. One involves the idea that intelligence involves working out the reasons for our own existence. The other involves self-awareness and the capacity to make inferences about what others know, want, or intend to do. The famous quote from Rene Descartes “I think; therefore, I am” needs to be revised to read “I am; therefore, I think.” Some of the conclusions we derive about intelligence include the idea that most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness); humans are the only species where what you know could get you killed; if humans become extinct it is highly unlikely that human-like intelligence will re-emerge on this planet and the odds of human-like intelligence evolving on other worlds is infinitely small. However, if intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe it may not have revealed itself because humans are dangerous and are perceived as posing too great a risk.

I’d reject it out of hand for the blatant human exceptionalism and the false claims right there: most species on planet Earth have clever brains but blank minds (no self-consciousness). Most species on Earth don’t have brains, for one, but additionally, have you met my cat? Not very clever, but definitely full of herself and quite aware of herself. There are a lot of claims in this abstract that the author does not adequately justify in the remainder of the opinion piece (it is not a scientific paper).

Then, in the first paragraph of the introduction, he cites Rhawn Joseph three times. Ugh. He’s an affiliate member of the Panspermia Mafia, I think we’re done.

I couldn’t help myself. I took a quick look in the table of contents to see what ol’ Rhawn was up to now. He’s still poring over NASA’s Mars photos, drawing circles and arrows on them, to claim now that there are tube worms and crustaceans on Mars.

At least he’s got the Daily Mail and Answers in Genesis to continue pretending he has any credibility at all left!

Burly brawn doesn’t win wars anymore

Among the many things Ted Cruz would like everyone to forget is this tweet from this fall:

Right-wing media were orgasming over a Russian army recruitment ad which portrayed Russian soldiers as these manly masculine macho dudes, and were contrasting that with the tolerant, diverse American army. The word “woke” got thrown around a lot, in a disparaging way. A lot of Republicans weren’t embarrassed to show off their authoritarian views at that time.

Unfortunately, nothing has really changed. Now Ted Cruz is simultaneously saying we need to get tough on Russia, and blaming the Ukraine war on Biden.

A truly Russian-style government would have Cruz arrested instantly for criticizing the Maximum Leader. I don’t think he (and I) want to replicate Russian militarism.