Now that’s a good science fair project

Good question.

Does your cat’s butthole really touch all the surfaces in your home?

I’m impressed. It’s an original idea, executed simply, and that’s what I like to see in a science fair question. It’s simple but a little bit icky: he put lipstick on a cat’s butthole and had it sit down on various substrates and asked if it left a mark. I hate to call it “elegant,” but yeah, that’s elegant.

I know you all want to know the answer:

His results and general findings: Long and medium haired cat’s buttholes made NO contact with soft or hard surfaces at all. Short haired cats made NO contact on hard surfaces. But we did see evidence of a slight smear on the soft bedding surface. Conclusion, if you have a short haired cat and they may be lying on a pile of laundry, an unmade bed, or other soft uneven surface, then their butthole MAY touch those surfaces!

Our evil cat is a shorthair, wouldn’t you know it.

Earth Day (or is it Air Day?)

I get excited when I find a couple of delicate strands of silk*, but then Mary has to come along and gloat about all the birds she saw just yesterday:

American Crow, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Blue Jay, Brown-headed Cowbird, Canada Goose, Cedar Waxwing, Chipping Sparrow, Collared Dove, Common Grackle, Common Pheasant, Common Starling, Downy Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Great-tailed Grackle, Hairy Woodpecker, Hermit Thrush, House Finch, House Sparrow, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Northern House Wren, Purple Finch, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Red-tailed Hawk, Red-winged Blackbird, Rock Dove, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Song Sparrow, White-breasted Nuthatch, White-throated Sparrow, Wood Duck, Yellow-rumped Warbler.

It’s no fair! She has set up this grand array of birdfeeders to draw in the local species.

There is ONE bird in all of that alluring food this morning.

Also unfair: stupid vertebrates. It takes a little longer for invertebrates to warm up. Give ’em time, they’ll outnumber the birds soon enough…probably already. They’re just not a bunch of show-offs.

Happy Earth Day!

* I’m also seeing silk in the compost bin, but the compost hasn’t thawed out yet. Soon!

Spidersign!

I’ve been checking this one spot along my walk to work all Spring, a row of metal signposts along a parking lot. These are simply dark metal objects that absorb what heat there is, and while they look barren and uninteresting, they have been a reliable home for a population of small spiders.

On Sunday, I saw nothing there. Yesterday, Monday, I saw this:

It’s silk. Just a few strands of spider silk across the bar, telling me that spiders have moved in. All of the signposts have silk to varying degrees, suggesting that maybe there was a recent hatch and a spider swarm is repopulating the area.

It’s reassuring to see, even as I’m buried under grading. Just two weeks to go before the semester ends and 6 months of sabbatical begins.

They want to claim vaccines are a bioweapon now

Well, hello there, Minnesota Republicans. You just had to pop your little heads up and prove to the world that you are ignorant, stupid, or insane. Behold, HF 3219, the mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act:

A bill for an act
relating to public safety; designating mRNA injections and products as weapons
of mass destruction; prohibiting mRNA injections and products; proposing coding
for new law in Minnesota Statutes, chapter 609.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:

Section 1. SHORT TITLE.
This act may be known as the “mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act.”

Sec. 2. [609.7121] MRNA BIOWEAPONS PROHIBITION.
Subdivision 1. Legislative intent. It is the intent of the legislature to designate mRNA
injections and products as weapons of mass destruction according to section 609.712 and
to prohibit possession or distribution of the mRNA injections and products in the state.
Subd. 2. Definitions. (a) For purposes of this section, the following terms have the
meanings given.
(b) “mRNA injections and products” means:

(1) with regards to the COVID injections, mRNA or “modified” messenger RNA as
related to the gene altering agents. The structure was altered by substituting two
N-methyl-pseudouridine amino acids for the usual uridine components so as to elude immune
destruction of the mRNA, which then allows the mRNA that produces the pathogenic Spike
protein to exist within cells for a longer period of time;

(2) all injections or products containing mRNA or “modified” messenger RNA;

(3) any human gene therapy product for any infectious disease indication, regardless of
whether the administration is termed an immunization, vaccine, or any other term; or

(4) nanotechnology or nanoparticles that alter genes and create a biosynthetic cell
replication.

For the purposes of this section, mRNA does not mean naturally occurring mRNA defined
as messenger ribonucleic acid that is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds
to the genetic sequence of a gene.

(c) “State or local government official” means the governor, attorney general, state
attorneys, county sheriffs, and other state and local law enforcement.

Subd. 3. Crime. Whoever knowingly manufactures, acquires, possesses, or makes readily
accessible to another mRNA injections and products is guilty of a crime and may be
sentenced as provided under section 609.712.
Subd. 5. State or local government official. A state or local government official must
use all lawful means necessary to enforce this section. A state or local government official
who does not enforce or investigate a violation under subdivision 3 when provided with
reasonable evidence of a violation is guilty of a crime and subject to the same penalties as
a person violating that subdivision.
Subd. 6. Civil action. A resident of the state may seek injunctive relief, declaratory
relief, and monetary damages from the state or a state and local government official for lack
of enforcement of this section.

Yep, they are designating mRNA vaccines as bioweapons, bioweapons of mass destruction, no less, and you can get up to 20 years in prison for manufacturing, possessing, distributing, or administering mRNA vaccines. This nonsense legislation has been peddled to legislatures all around the country by a guy named Joseph Sansone, a psychotherapist with a bug up his butt about vaccines.

You don’t believe me? Perhaps you will trust a far-right MAGA site that has all the assertions.

Minnesota Statutes § 609.712 criminalizes the development, possession, or use of weapons of mass destruction, including biological agents, recombinant or synthetic nucleic acids, and delivery systems that may cause widespread death, serious injury, or disruption to public safety. The statute defines “biological agents” broadly to include any virus or genetically engineered element capable of causing disease or biological malfunction in humans.

By referencing this statute, the legislature affirms that mRNA-based injections—particularly those using modified nucleosides to produce synthetic Spike proteins or alter gene expression—fit the statutory definition of a biological agent capable of mass harm. This bill, therefore, applies the existing legal framework of § 609.712 to classify and prohibit such products under criminal law within the state of Minnesota.

According to the peer-reviewed literature and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the COVID-19 mRNA injections have caused widespread harm and death. In fact, they are estimated to have killed more people than 121 Hiroshima nuclear bombings:

Filing this bill would not have been possible without the critical work of Dr. Joseph Sansone, who originally drafted the model legislation on which this bill is based. His tireless advocacy and early legal framework helped pave the way for states like Minnesota to take bold action against experimental gene-based technologies.

WHO estimates about 15 million excess deaths worldwide from the COVID epidemic, so according to this quack, there were more people killed by the vaccine than by the virus, as determined by abuse of VAERS statistics.

That’s enough for a bevy of state politicians, every one of them a Republican, to propose criminalizing a useful and successful vaccine.

There have been no hearings on this bill yet, and it hasn’t passed beyond the demented MAGA masturbation stage. Let’s hope the stupidity dies a quick and painful death.

What’s your IQ?

I don’t care, because most people’s understanding of IQ is ill-founded and wrong.

All the belligerent guys online who insist they have a high IQ? I suspect many of them haven’t actually taken an IQ test at all.

Not a proper one, anyway. Official IQ tests, whatever their limitations, are highly-refined scientific tools. They take a lot of time, and cost a fair amount of money.

Basically, I would be beyond amazed if actual IQ tests, and all they involve, have become so widely accessible that @BigNutzz32998762 on Twitter/X and his countless peers who brag about their 178 IQ have been genuinely, properly assessed.

Also, given how IQ actually works, if countless random people were scoring ridiculously high on real IQ tests, wouldn’t they have to recalibrate the underlying assumptions, to keep the average as 100?

Point is, if so many people were scoring extremely high on official IQ tests, their scores would be reduced, to conform to the bell-curve. Because it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be ‘above average’.

I haven’t taken a full, proper IQ test myself — I’ve had my IQ extrapolated from my scores on long, complex standardized tests, like the SAT and GRE. I’m not going to say what it was, because I know the limitations and fallacies of these kinds of tests, and because it was forty or fifty years ago, and my brain has been constantly changing.

The one thing I know is that people who brag about their IQ are never very intelligent.

You know what else is silly? People who declare that the conformation of your chromosomes determines your identity, your behavior, and your role in society. I know for a fact that almost no one has had their karyotype done — the exceptions are cases where there is evidence of a serious heritable anomaly — so the knowledge about chromosomes is practically negligible among the general public.

Even worse: people who have opinions on the contributions of genetics on IQ.

Forget IQ. As we all know, the proper way to score intelligence is by birthdate.

I can verify this by personal experience. I was born on 9 March, my wife was born on 10 September.

There is an extremely smug crackpot prowling the streets of Minneapolis today

This past weekend, I had a brief encounter with a ranting, raving kook howling about nefarious Jews and the virtues of the Tao. He also predicted that the Pope would die in 48 hours.

Uh-oh. The Pope has died.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died, the Vatican said on Monday, ending an often turbulent reign marked by division and tension as he sought to overhaul the hidebound institution.
He was 88, and had suffered a serious bout of double pneumonia this year, but his death came as a shock after he had been driven around St. Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile to greet cheering crowds on Easter Sunday.

He was 88, had been very ill, so it’s not much of a prediction, but OK, he gets to score 1 point. I’m going to predict that the street kook is feeling full of himself today and is babbling more nonsense more vehemently, a prediction that is even more predictable.

Anyone want a furry 10-lb wrecking ball?

Last night, this beast nearly cost me a lot of money.

She decided to jump up on my desk, but she is not a sinuous, agile feline — she is an inept, clumsy idiot. She landed on my webcam and sent it flying, and then tried to recover badly by leaping up and back, ending up between the wall and my computer, where there’s nothing but a tangle of cables which did not provide a solid purchase. She scrabbled frantically at the cables, disconnecting most of them, and hurled herself at the wall, then bounced into the back of the monitor.

I don’t know what she did next because all I saw was that my computer shut down and the monitor was toppling forward into my face.

Anyway, if anyone needs a demolition cat I’m willing to throw her into a box and pay for the postage.

And a good time was had by all

I had to skip out on all the talks of the last day of the American Atheists convention — we’re entering the last two weeks of the semester, with lots of extra work, and usually I spend my weekends catching up on grading and preparing for the next week of content, so I’m already behind.

It was a good weekend though, although yesterday was all deja vu. So many talks on social justice! It sounded like an atheist conference from 15 years ago, with all the liberal weirdos standing up and talking about feminism and gay rights and how the atheist community needs to fight for equality, except this time around we didn’t have audience members leaving their seats and cornering the speakers later to hiss at them about how “atheism only means disbelief in gods, how dare you taint the meeting with liberalism” and then the speakers get assailed with nothing but hate mail from the unbelievers for a year afterwards. So it’s getting better. I think the religious right is actually helping things, because nowadays everyone is seeing the horrible consequences of raging conservatism on the country. The few times I heard Trump mentioned, the audience was snarling/groaning/booing in response.

One difference: no one was talking about science. Not one talk the entire weekend. I think that might be another unintended consequence of so many of the atheist-scientists of yore having turned out to be such roaring asshats. Thanks so much, Dawkins & Coyne & Harris & Pinker, you’ve made science a toxic pill in everyone’s mouth.

I went for a walk in Minneapolis, near the atheist con

I spotted different breed of street preacher. He was ranting at the top of his lungs about “the Tao” and something about kundalini.

How refreshing, I thought.

Then he started raving about the Jews are an abomination and predicting the Pope will die in 48 hours.

I decided not to bother debating him.

It was right near the Mary Tyler Moore statue, if someone else has more fortitude than I do.

What I learned yesterday

This old atheist found it to be an encouraging day.

  • Keith Ellison spoke at an atheist conference despite being a Muslim because he’s committed to religious freedom and plurality. He also never shuts up about rights and freedoms, and Nick Fish, who was interviewing him, had an easy job since you can just wind Ellison up and he keeps going and going and going, saying all the right things.
  • I spoke to Debbie Goddard for a bit, and she’s optimistic about the direction American Atheists is taking. They’re listening to the members and volunteers, and those people all want social justice to be a priority, and AA is listening. Hey, I feel less like an isolated weirdo over here.
  • Aron Ra’s dog Falcor is a pretty cool dude.
  • Do not leave your phone charger in the parking garage across the street. I did, and I was afraid to prowl the building after dark, so I’m going to have to wait for sunrise to get my phone working again.

Shortly, I’m going to retrieve my phone charger, maybe have breakfast, and then go off to a bunch of social justice talks. This should also be a good day.