I got stuff done today. A quiz written and posted online, and I took this huge pile of my late mother’s savings bonds to the bank. Almost 200 slips of paper, and they’re being processed and interest calculated as a I type. Unfortunately, to get that done I had to personally sign each one there at the bank.
I can’t feel my right arm now. It’s simultaneously numb and sore. That represents one tedious chore done, though.
They’re called “segregation academies,” private schools set up to siphon off state education money to support discriminatory policies. If you live in an area with many black students, somebody will create a school with enrollment that excludes the kinds of people you don’t like, often to make sure only white students get in, or students with particular religious beliefs, and then it’s a double-win: they get to take in state money through voucher programs, and they get to charge their ignorant, bigoted parents excessive fees. It’s an “elite” school, after all. Pay up!
ProPublica examined the effects of these voucher programs on a set of private academies in North Carolina. These schools have a specific purpose, and it’s exactly the purpose that has inflamed the electorate in recent years: isolationism, racism, and ignorance.
Back when segregation academies opened, some white leaders proudly declared their goal of preserving segregation. Others shrouded their racist motivations. Some white parents complained about federal government overreach and what they deemed social agendas and indoctrination in public schools. Even as violent backlash against integration erupted across the region, many white parents framed their decisions as quests for quality education, morality and Christian education, newspaper coverage and school advertisements from the time show.
They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of state education funds. You know that if a local creepy throwback of an academy in a region is getting millions of dollars, that money is coming out of a pool of cash earmarked for general education…and that means the public schools, which are free to the public, get less. And it’s a scam.
Opportunity Scholarships don’t always live up to their name for Black children. Private schools don’t have to admit all comers. Nor do they have to provide busing or free meals. Due to income disparities, Black parents also are less likely to be able to afford the difference between a voucher that pays at most $7,468 a year and an annual tuition bill that can top $10,000 or even $20,000.
So your choices are to send your child to a public school that doesn’t charge tuition, or accept a $5000 voucher to send them to a private school that demands that you pay them an additional $10,000. The private school isn’t necessarily better, but it does provide the helpful service of preventing your child from rubbing elbows with brown children, and may offer the bonus of teaching them more Sunday School-style Jesus.
This is how the Republicans aim to destroy education. They’re going to offer more and more “alternatives” that don’t improve anything, but do pander to the biases of their voters, and that have the advantage of also wrecking public schools. Even if they are building good schools (they probably aren’t), they’re making sure that the non-Republican electorate has fewer opportunities, is less qualified for higher education and upscale work, and are effectively poisoning the minds of the citizenry.
They’ve got at least four more years of running rampant and wrecking institutions. Perhaps some of you figure you can weather a few years and rebuild to come roaring back with progressive values, but you know who can’t handle four more years of ruined education? Kids. Childhood is short, the educational curriculum has year-by-year goals and standards, and if you tear out that foundation, there’s nothing to build on later.
I still recall my 3rd grade year, when I had a couple of weeks of school lost to acute appendicitis, and I came back to discover that I’d missed out on some basic stuff that my peers had already mostly mastered (was it fractions? I recall being bewildered by numerators and denominators for a while). I had to struggle to catch up, and it wasn’t fun — but I was motivated by being already academically inclined, so I had to do the work. Imagine if I missed a year, or two years, though. I probably would have just given up.
An even better example of institutional failure: in general, our current public school system does a poor job of educating students in math, and that has a ripple effect on our colleges. In Europe, most universities offer a complete degree program in three years; here in the USA, it’s usually four years. A lot of that difference is because so many students are ready for calculus when they enroll; some high school programs barely teach algebra. Seriously. I advise so many students who want to get a science degree, and their first year is spent teaching them remedial algebra so that they can do basic stoichiometry in their first chemistry class, or understand elementary concepts in biochemistry for their first biology class.
And Republicans think it more important that no brown people pollute their high school dance, that they don’t get exposed to evilution, or that their history classes don’t mention slavery, or that they learn the highest moral value is to attend church on Sunday? Those are omissions from their education that we will pay for at the college level and beyond.
It’s been a weekend. My wife pulled a double-shift last night, and I took advantage of the boring silence in the house to wrap up the preparations for my last week of classes, and was up way too late. For my history of evolutionary thought class, I have the laziest plan ever: the students are doing presentations all week, and are also responsible for evaluating their peers. For my intro class, I’ve got one last lecture all queued up and ready to go, and then on Thursday they get an exam. But right now, I’m really tired and should get some sleep tonight.
Now for some light entertainment. A company called Extropic is getting millions of dollars of funding on the basis of this kind of gobbledygook.
Extropic describes itself as building a
computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world.[Extropic, 2023]
There you go. Translate, please.
I’m no physicist, but even I can see that that’s a lot of noise — they’ve garbled up a few thermodynamics buzzwords and mixed them up with the magic word “AI”. Helpfully, they go further to try and explain.
And the hardware wants to be stochastic, if we want to keep scaling. So why don’t we just cut the Gordian knot and simplify things, and implement AI algorithms in, as the stochastic physics of the world. So what we’re building at Extropic is a full stack, Physics-based computing paradigm focused on AI. And we harness the stochastic physics of electrons directly in order to instantiate probabilistic machine learning, which is the parent concept to generative AI.
Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I’m just a lowly biologist. Maybe I’d just like to know how someone can con millions of dollars out of silicon valley venture capitalists with that kind of insipid, pretentious babble. Are VCs just not very bright?
All it needs is some goofy AI-generated ‘art’ to make it look like sci-fi…and look, the gullible tech press provides!
Argiope are epic spiders — they’re big, spectacularly colorful, voracious, and if you witness them, you’d be impressed at how quickly they can trap and kill their prey. But now we learn they also use sex appeal to capture dinner.
Predators and prey have direct interactions that influence their short-term behaviors, including resource allocation and strategies for moving through habitats. However, the presently observed behaviors are the products of coevolutionary interactions, posited to be a history of measures and countermeasures between the predator and prey. We found that Argiope (orb-weaver) spiders in the continental USA appear to use a pheromone lure that mimics the mating pheromone of the day-flying Hemileuca moth (buck moth) to entice male moths into their webs. We found evidence that different phylogenetic groups of Hemileuca moths respond to the Argiope pheromone lure with a broad range of responses, ranging from indifferent to acutely strongly attracted, suggesting a coevolutionary history of predator–prey countermeasures. One of these countermeasures may be the potential evolution of moth developmental timing (adult emergence) to avoid Argiope predation in areas where the ranges of the moths and spiders overlap.
I’ve seen fields filled with tens of thousands of Argiope, with a web every few steps. Oddly, I didn’t see any moths nearby, even though this should have been a giant invitation to an orgy. No moths, period. I wonder why?
We Americans have all had a pleasant Thanksgiving and possibly an indulgent Black Friday, but it’s time to get back to work. Yesterday, Zach Hancock gave a presentation on why the hereditarian fallacy is a fallacy — the math doesn’t work. The video demonstrates an important truth: biology requires math. In this case, it’s a fairly simple level of math, so if you know a little algebra and maybe a little statistics, you should be able to cope.
It’s an important message, too. Racism and hereditarianism are built on a false premise, and anyone who tries to use population genetics to argue against evolution or for racism doesn’t understand some rather basic stuff.
It gets in some good digs against Steven Pinker, too, who clearly doesn’t understand genetics or basic math.
Now get to work. Your break is over.
My wife’s flower patch:
Ken Ham is proud to announce that Answers in Genesis will be celebrating a non-Woke Christmas.
It wasn’t that long ago that woke was just a word I used in the context of “waking up” after being asleep. Now the word woke has permeated our culture with various meanings, including believing in what are called “progressive” (actually anti-God) values.
Over the past couple of years, many organizations and companies have been described as becoming “woke,” which usually means they have greatly restricted or abolished freedom for those with a truly Christian worldview. And in recent times, we’ve seen considerable backlash against various companies because of their woke positions (which often result in pushing a transgender ideology, etc.). But really, the woke agenda is driven by a secular/anti-Christian worldview based on man’s word rather than God’s Word!
As I often remind people, believing in a literal Genesis 1–11 is the key to being “woke-proof,” as Genesis 1–11 is the foundation for marriage, gender, and, in fact, everything! I tell people that Answers in Genesis is a “non-woke” organization and our Ark Encounter and Creation Museum are “non-woke” attractions.
As the culture becomes more secular, woke, and permeated by moral relativism, Answers in Genesis and our two attractions exist like a beautiful oasis in a desert environment increasingly devoid of biblical truth.
Well, isn’t that nice. AiG finds comfort in reducing the Bible to one page at the beginning of the book, and discouraging people from exploring further. After all, if they read the New Testament they might be introduced to a radical Woke character who encouraged tolerance and change. Although, if you browse YouTube, you might find a lot of loud evangelical preachers who are trying desperately to tell listeners that Jesus wasn’t actually tolerant, and that his values, and yours, are more properly founded in hate.
Right now, I’m seeing a lot of journalists joining Ham in repudiating “woke”. It’s silly. They don’t understand what “woke” is or that the Democrats were not particularly “woke” in the last campaign, so I’m seeing claims that “woke” fueled dissension, and that the liberal side was focused on arguing identity politics.
And so this narrative of succumbing to “Big Woke”, according to the American journalist Jack Mirkinson, “bears virtually no resemblance to the actual campaign we all just suffered through”. Woke talking points were a key part not of Harris’s campaign but of Trump’s – he said that Harris suddenly “became a Black person” to capitalise on her race, and his campaign spent millions on ads about transgender rights. Welcome to the culture war – where only the right is really fighting, and the other side is helping it out by punching itself in the face.
Except that Harris ran a centrist campaign, and liberals don’t argue about pronouns — if I’m told what pronoun someone prefers, I accept it and we’re done. The only people fighting over pronouns are the far right weirdos who want everyone to conform to their dogma and stereotypes, like Ken Ham.
I’m going to continue to be “woke,” as long as that means aspiring to a just and equitable world. If that means accepting a “secular/anti-Christian worldview,” then so be it — it’s a stance I’m already comfortable with.
There’s a new phenomenon sweeping across the social media platform, BlueSky: lists. Lots of lists.
The way this works is that anyone can make a list of other BlueSky users and post about its existence — then everyone who sees it can click on the list and follow, or block, all the people on the list. For instance, here’s a list called “Bug Macrophotography” which contains the names and BlueSky accounts of people who do macrophotography of insects. Handy! With a single click you can subscribe to all of their feeds…or if you’re horrified at bug closeups, block them all. It’s a way to quickly fill up with people you follow.
I mostly like it, except for the fact that, a while ago, the only content you’d see is people posting their lists. I haven’t made any lists, because as some of you may know, I have an aversion to List Lords dating back to my old talk.origins days. Peter Nyikos left scars.
Anyway, there is also a tool called ClearSky.app that lets you see who you, or anybody for that matter, has blocked. Here’s everyone I have blocked in my short tenure on BlueSky:
Pitiful. I have to do better.
I can also see a list of all the people who have blocked me. It’s much longer so I won’t post it here; just go to ClearSky.app and enter my user name, pzmyers.bsky.social for yourself and you can see how many people dislike me. I don’t mind being blocked at all, I encourage more to shut me off.
You can also see a list of lists, all the lists that have my name on them. Some of them are from people encouraging more people to follow me, some are lists encouraging more people to block me. I discovered that there is a list called “FtBullies” that brought back old memories. It’s been years since all the bloggers here were called “FtBullies,” I guess the slymepitters have found a new home.
Still, I think it’s a good development that BlueSky has tools to help you curate your social media feed.
The first quarter of 2025 is going to be rough.
Does he even understand what tariffs do? Like, who ends up paying for them? He wants to impose a 25% tax on our two most important agricultural partners, and also on our trade partner, China. In the middle of winter, fruit and vegetable prices will be launched skyward. I also expect that the big grocery chains will see this as an opportunity for even greater price gouging. Didn’t he campaign on complaining that grocery bills were too damn high?
He also tried this before in 2018, slapping more tariffs on goods from China. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
I think my Christmas present to my wife and myself will be all about stocking the pantry in December, and maybe we’ll have to expand the backyard garden in the spring.
Do we have to remind him of Smoot-Hawley? I hate having to dust off my high school civics knowledge.
