These anti-education frauds don’t belong anywhere in public life

Larry Arnn, the president of a Christian bible college, Hillsdale, gave a little talk at a private reception that you weren’t supposed to record, because he felt comfortable saying the quiet part out loud.

Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, Larry, but Christian colleges are the dumbest part of the American system of higher ed. They’re the part that expects students to adhere to dogma, instead of questioning everything, and make the myths of magical beings that didn’t exist a key part of the curriculum. I don’t think Arnn is qualified to judge what is “dumb”, since he has a history of wallowing in dumb for all of his life.

His logic is bad, too. Some fields of study have “subjects,” like physics or literature (which is just about reading books), but education…doesn’t? Except that it does, since it’s the “study of how to teach,” but he rather feebly disqualifies that as not “a separate art”. Pedagogy, psychology, communication, and competence in a subject being taught don’t count, because Larry Arnn, shill for the Heritage Foundation, says they don’t.

We’ve got a good education program here at UMM — I guess Hillsdale doesn’t — and I have education students in my classes all the time. In order to get certified to teach science in a public school, they are expected to get a degree in a science discipline. The real thing. A full degree. No shortcuts. On top of that, they have to meet all of the requirements for an education degree, and it’s often a five-year program to complete. No, it’s not the “dumbest part” of my college. That title would belong to a theology department, which we don’t have, because we don’t teach inscrutable dogma and archaic magic.

There’s not a word of truth in anything Arnn said, but he really let’s slip the theocratic agenda of the Christian right.

Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.

That is absolutely not true. It’s a skill. It requires a solid foundation in knowledge. There’s a kind of arrogance in thinking you can just do it, or that all of education is an amorphous mass with no specialization required.

For instance, I teach college level biology, and no, I don’t think Larry Arnn could do it. He’d only miseducate his students. But I don’t think that implies that I could teach everyone and everything. My wife has a Ph.D. in child psychology, and is an expert in communicating with little kids and helping them learn. I don’t even compare with her in her domain, and she couldn’t do my job, and there ought to be some mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities…unless you’re Larry Arnn, who thinks he could teach everything. What an ass.

It’s all part of the Republican plan to destroy public education, though. You declare that education isn’t a thing, that teachers can be easily replaced by any old yahoo (although, preferably, stay-at-home moms who aren’t permitted to work anywhere else), and you can start declaring schools superfluous.

I do wonder how Hillsdale parents are going to react to that, since many of those conservative families were howling about how the pandemic meant the kids had to stay at home, and although they didn’t say it, were probably cringing at the thought of having to teach their lovely little third-grader math every day.

What’s going on down in Bolingbrook?

William Brinkman has been documenting the strange goings-on in Bolingbrook, IL for years on his blog, and now he has gone and given us a book giving us a perspective on that weird place, called The Rift.

What if everything you believed was a lie?

Tom Larsen grew up believing in stories from the Bolingbrook Babbler newspaper: of UFOs, half-human weredeer, and of vampire gangs that roamed the streets at night. Then one day his parents told him the truth—the stories were all a lie.

Fresh out of college, Tom built a reputation as a blogger of the scientific skepticism movement, debunking the reports of paranormal events in his hometown. However, after famous podcast host, Jamie Kyle, posted a video about how Tom’s attempts to “hook up” with her at a skeptic’s conference made her feel uncomfortable, the blogger was furious.

Now, in his mid-twenties and still angry about his humiliation, Tom has made a career from defending the skeptical movement against “modern feminists”, including Humanist Heart, a group of social justice skeptics. And, when he hears that his hometown of Bolingbrook will host Humanist Heart’s congress, and Jamie will be their guest, Tom hatches a plan to confront the podcaster.

The only problem is that he must work for the Bolingbrook Babbler to gain access to the congress, and risk ruining his skeptic reputation. But an attack by a weredeer while working on his first assignment for the Babbler leaves Tom’s beliefs in pieces. The monsters, the UFOs, everything he tried to debunk—are all real!

Now, there are angry Men’s Rights Activists trying to disrupt the congress, weredeer have surrounded the area, and mysterious time rifts appearing throughout the village. Only Jamie and the Babbler can help Tom fix this, but will he be able to get past his anger and distrust before reaching the point of no return?

That sounds uncomfortably familiar, echoing the last decade of the skeptic/atheist movement. Except for the weredeer and the UFOs.

Wait. MRAs exist, and skeptics who resent not being allowed to use women as their toys exist…if a herd of pointy-hoofed mammals come after me at the full moon, I’m not going to close my eyes and say they aren’t there.

Discovering my role on campus

There was a call for campus bodies today — they were recording a recruiting video, I think, so they just wanted a swarm of college-like people to mill around on the mall. I dutifully showed up to do my part to serve the UMM community, like a good boy, and they started splitting up the mob. You walk here, you walk there, you two throw a football around, etc. Reasonably enough, they started organizing the young photogenic types first, setting them in motion. I was predictably the last one…and the organizers walked away, leaving me aimless, so I just moved out of the frame and hid behind a tree.

At least now I know my job. I’m the creepy old guy lurking in the shrubbery while the co-eds and jocks frolic in a bucolic collegiate scene. You can still sign up for the university, because you all know I’m mostly harmless, just kind of unsightly. The worst I might do is show you a spider.

What is a woman?

I got this question in email. Oh god.

I was wondering if you are, or were willing to comment on Matt Walsh’s movie, ‘What is a Woman?’?

While I did see your post on the question being asked to Ketanji Brown Jackson, I did find your response a little unsatisfying. Yes, coming up with an inclusive, biology specific definition is problematic; but Matt and others are just asking for a basic dictionary or functional definition. If you can define a cat, as for example, a member of the Family Felidae, or a carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, or a common family pet that purrs, then you should be able to provide a definition of a woman.

Most of the people asked in Matt’s movie either refuse to provide a definition, or give a circular definition. This is problematic in a couple of ways. Words have meaning. If you are unwilling, or unable, to provide a definition of a word that you use, then that word is meaningless. If you can define what cat, dog, or bird means, but can’t, or won’t, define man or woman, then there is a problem. If you are unwilling to define what a woman is because you are worried about the personal consequences of doing that publicly, such as public backlash, losing your job, etc. then you have a perfect example of cancel culture.

No, I didn’t see that movie, nor will I be seeing it in the future. It’s a stupid gotcha question.

You know, not everything fits into a tidy category that can be encapsulated in a brief dictionary entry. This bizarre need to make everything sharp-edged, black-and-white, rigidly and scrupulous defined is a you problem, not a me problem. I’m fine with ambiguity and complexity, and “woman” is an extremely complex category. If you’re going to complain about circular definitions, the Merriam-Webster definition fits the bill: “an adult female person”. Sure, go with that. “Adult” is ill-defined, “person” is the subject of many arguments, and “female”…well, here’s another dictionary definition: “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs”. “Typically,” huh. So not necessarily? Or how about this alternative, “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”? That implies a simple binary, which is false, and worse, suggests males and females are opposites of each other, rather than positions on a continuum.

Oh, here’s another alternative: “characteristic of girls, women, or the female sex”. See “woman”.

You want a nice clean dictionary definition? Sorry, guy, that’s just a whole ‘nother ball of worms. The desire for a reductive simplification is a fallacious goal that is just going to fuck you up. It is not “cancel culture” if people give you the side-eye and think you’re an ass if you provide a simple-minded definition that excludes a large number of women who know they are women, who have a history of womanhood, who interact with society as women, who present as women, who live as women, because you want an inadequate 5 word definition that makes you feel like you’ve mastered the concept of “woman” while not actually understanding anything. That approach always leads to slotting all women into a narrow restrictive box that makes no one happy or satisfied. It also damages men, because then, since we’re “opposites”, we’re expected to shun anything that might overlap with femininity.

Here’s something else that’s problematic: that you think a theocratic fascist like Matt Walsh is making a good point by insisting that everyone must provide a narrow range of criteria for womanhood. Nope, not going to do it. I’ve met many women, and they are diverse. They’re not Barbie dolls, mass produced for your pleasure. Stop trying to find a single mold to define them, and accept them as people. If you face public backlash because they reject your expectations of how a woman should be, that’s not “cancel culture”. That’s just someone recognizing you are an asshole. And if lots of people think the same way, consider the possibility that it’s not their failure to define a word to meet your simplistic views, it’s that maybe you are an asshole.

You know who else liked Walsh’s awful movie? JK Rowling.

If you find yourself agreeing with either Walsh or Rowling, you’ve accepted a conservative view that dehumanizes women, reducing them to a cartoon.

Also, please don’t try to pretend the authority of biology supports your expectation of sharp, precise boundaries to everything. Biologists know that biology is fuzzy about everything.

He’s such a good Republican

An empty football helmet. Perfect!

Herschel Walker personifies all those good ol’ Republican ideals: stupidity, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty.

He might be the next Senator from Georgia. You can hear all the chucklefucks in the audience clucking approvingly over his ‘science’, and you can hear the gears grinding. Why should we do something that benefits us if it also benefits the rest of the world? They’re all thinking about modifying their trucks so they can roll coal now and teach China a lesson.

Now I wonder if he’s actually lying, or his brain is so rotten that he doesn’t know he’s lying.

Doesn’t matter, the deader the brain and the more corrupt the morals, the better the Republican candidate.

For those who missed it yesterday

Here’s that image from the NASA press release yesterday.

That’s spectacular, even as reduced for the blog. You can see the whole full sized image at NASA.

What’s amazing about it is that the gravitational lensing is so obvious that even a biologist can see it. Notice those stretched and curved galaxies that form a kind of whorl around the center of the image? That’s not a camera artifact, it’s caused by a galaxy in the foreground bending light making the 4 billion light-year trek from the source to the telescope. This is beautiful stuff. Phil Plait explains it far better than I can, even if in that article he’s using a blurry image from Hubble. Blurry compared to this one, that is.

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn that from the press conference. I picked it up from all the astronomers and physicists talking about it on Twitter. The press conference was incompetence personified.

After 45 minutes of waiting with the most irritating hold music NASA could produce, the screen opened on a group of people with a poorly resolved black square in the background, the image above. You couldn’t see much of anything, because most of the screen space was dedicated to making sure you could see the old people talking about it. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden said some platitudes that mainly amounted to being so proud that the speckled black square in the distance was the product of American ingenuity, while NASA Administrator Bill Nelson talked about how very far away those lights were. It was soul-deadening stuff that told me nothing about what I was looking at. See that short paragraph about lensing that I scribbled out above? Pitiful as it is, that says far more about the image than anything in the press conference.

I watched a little bit of NASA TV before they put me on ear-grating hold, and one thing I learned is that a bunch of engineers, politicians, and administrators are terrible at putting on a show. I’ve seen better production values from amateurs (not me, of course, I suck) putting home-produced videos on YouTube. They also seem to think that crackly fuzzy flattened audio on everything makes them sound authentic.

A suggestion to NASA: next time you advertise a dramatic reveal of some gorgeous discovery, tell all the bureaucrats to stay home. Don’t book any of the politicians, who won’t know what they’re looking at, and will think it’s reasonable to delay the whole event for some other issue of statecraft (they should do that, and shut up about science). Instead, bring on a small team of scientists who will express their blissful joy at what they see, and will help us understand why this is so cool.

That’s Science Communication 101. NASA doesn’t get it. It’s a bit embarrassing how bad they are at it.

This invasive species hasn’t invaded my neighborhood

This is rather interesting: an article from the National Museum of Ireland describing the appearance of the noble false widow (Steatoda nobilis) in that country, in the late 1990s. I haven’t seen any of that specific species in my neighborhood, but apparently they are a significantly invasive species. We have lots of Steatoda and Parasteatoda here, though!

Most of us in Ireland have heard about this recent arrival, but few would know its scientific name, Steatoda nobilis. This spider is more commonly known as the noble false widow.

Interestingly, in an article published at the time (Nolan 1999), Myles Nolan tells the reader that a couple of weeks prior to the aforementioned Bray discovery, another person had found a great number of these spiders on their own property, approximately 250m away from the Bray residence. The author observed at the time that these spiders have a high reproductive rate, and that the spiderlings are inclined to disperse widely from the egg sac, perhaps accounting for this species’ ability to colonise easily.

The Museum specimen detailed in our acquisition register is, however, the first valid Irish record as an identified specimen was lodged with the Museum. That specimen (called a ‘voucher specimen’) is now stored safely in the Museum and is available for study and research.

As Ireland currently houses relatively few animals who pose a risk to human health, this new arachnid is now of great curiosity to the public. The reports, however, are over emphasised, and there is little for humans to fear from the noble false widow.

A recent report from the Irish scientific community however, showed that a common lizard had been preyed upon by this diminutive spider (Dunbar et al. 2018). The young lizard was discovered wrapped in spider webbing, with the noble false widow crouched over its head, presumed to have been feeding on it – a potential worry for Ireland’s only native terrestrial reptile.
The noble false widow can now be found in at least 17 Irish counties, all year round, both indoors and out (although more so the latter). They have a strong tendency to live on manmade structures and materials, such as steel, concrete and timber. Sheds, outhouses and boundary railings provide the perfect habitat for our new arrival.

Part of the reason for the relatively sudden appearance of Steatoda nobilis in the scientific eye, though, is the British tabloids, which had an absolute freakout over big spiders, playing up the nearly non-existent dangers and clutching their pearls over the observation of a few spiders near one of the Queen’s estates. It was ridiculous.

Increase in Spider Recording Scheme records for Steatoda nobilis in Britain parallels intensified
press coverage in the local newspapers (dark blue bars = spider records, light blue line = number of press
articles). The sudden massive increase in records seen in the last decade coincides with the first appearance
of the species in various other countries far from the native range in the Macaronesian islands.

I can vouch for Steatoda‘s eagerness to disperse — when I found the newly emerged clutch of spiderlings yesterday evening, they had nicely spread out equidistant from each other in their container, and when I opened it up, the race was on, with all the spiderlings on the edge of the mass rushing to get out into the larger lab. I think they don’t much care for their brothers and sisters.

The “high reproductive rate”, though, is a relative thing. My impression of Steatoda triangulosa and Steatoda borealis, the local species in the genus, is that they were sluggards compared to Parasteatoda. They take a month to develop from egg to spiderling, compared to Parasteatoda‘s week and a half, and they have much smaller clutch sizes than Parasteatoda. I’ve been sitting here feeling like the Steatodas take forever to get to the point I can work with them.

On the other hand, at the end of that month I am finding myself drowning in baby spiders…

Back from our adventure

We visited Minneapolis-St Paul this past weekend so we could watch Iliana and Skatje walk on Mars…


…and Iliana and Grandma going undersea.

I am reminded that little kids are exhausting. We thoroughly enjoyed our weekend with an energetic 3 year old, but it was necessary to get home to recover. Except…yikes, things are heating up in the lab.

I had one egg sac open up 12 days ago, and another this weekend. A third is imminent — I dread going into the lab today to see even more spiderlings. Then there are two more that will open up in a week. I got home last night and had to sort out and move a cloud of adorable baby spiders into separate containers. I’ve got two small incubators in my lab, and they’ll be full today; I’m running out of the small plastic containers I keep the small ones in. Then I’ve got a Parasteatoda egg sac that is threatening to hatch out any day now.

I am beginning to realize it may be possible to have too many spiders.