Florida Men

Here’s another reason to avoid Florida: these idiots are on the road. Apparently there was a bit of a wrangle with one person tailgating, another person throwing a water bottle, and then this guy, Eric Popper, decides that the appropriate response is to fumble in the center well and pull out a gun, and proceeds to unload 11 shots sort of vaguely in the direction of his enemy.

I’m impressed. He shot up his own car door and window, dashboard, and windshield. He has his eyes closed and is just firing wildly. Tres macho.

Astonishingly, or maybe not since this is ‘Merica, this was the outcome.

According to the arrest report, both the victim and Popper reported the incident to the police. During the investigation, Popper told state troopers he believed he was shot at so that was why he began shooting. The other driver said he did not have a firearm but said he did throw a water bottle at Popper’s car. Surprisingly, there were no reported injuries. Both parties were released at the scene.

Were they given back their driver’s licences and allowed to get in their damaged vehicles and drive away? Neither of these guys should ever be allowed on the road again.

Most people would agree we don’t come from monkeys, and we didn’t Big Bang, right

Flerfer.

Trump guy at a Trump rally, talking about flat earth:

Let’s go Brandon!

Jesus fucking christ, I’m just going to put my head down and work on genetics now.

Currently on schedule

Deviations will not be allowed, or the whole course train will crumple in a tremendous crash.

So: Mondays I give the lecture I prepared the day before, and get the genetics lab ready, and grade student problem sets. Tuesday, prep the lecture for Wednesday, and teach the lab. Wednesday, give the lecture, compose a new problem set, also work with my biocomm students. Thursday, second lab…also the day the university throws meetings at me. Friday, all spiders. Saturday, run through the next genetics lab, make a video summary. Sunday, write Monday’s lecture.

Can’t stop all semester long. The routine rules me now.

Except this week, I have to write the first take-home midterm, which I’ll then have to grade over the weekend. I’ll cope. Today, for instance, I got up at 4:30 and got the lecture done early, to give myself a little time to put together a first draft of the exam. The trains will run on time, or a head will roll. (I’m a fascist to myself, not to the students.)

I’m also anxious about this stupid pandemic and how it’s going to try and derail me. That’s why I’ve got all these contingency plans in my pocket. I have a timetable. Death and disease must not disrupt it.

You may ask, this is only the third week of a 15 week semester, why a midterm now? One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that if the students don’t the simple fundamentals early on, their train will crash and burn when we get to the hard stuff, so I do an early check on their comprehension.

Crank up the stupid to warp factor 11!

I despair. Since I watched that Dan Olson video about crypto, and really learned how stupidly deep the rabbit hole goes, I’ve started regularly checking David Gerard’s blog, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, every morning. This is too much. After a few decades of dealing with the ludicrously inane garbage creationists spew, and living under Donald Trump, and then having to wallow in the idiocy of Jordan Peterson, now I’m going to pay attention to criminal grifting NFT-bros? Brain, stop it.

At this rate, every last bit of my confidence in the fundamental goodness of humanity is going to be eradicated. We apparently have no vestige of any kind of survival instinct left.

The bit about Matt Powell

Last night, I did a livestream on YouTube. YouTube tends to bury these things, so I’m doing an experiment: I yanked out a 20 minute segment (it’s shorter! That helps) and reposted it. That also meant I could go in and edit and add an endtitle that gives credit to my Patreon supporters.

This is a bit where I talked about Matt Powell’s latest clueless video. I guess he hates pop culture almost as much as he mangles science.

The complete livestream is here, about an hour long, if you want to hear my exasperation at Jordan Peterson, and a bit about a recent paper on bat evolution.

Oh, also, I guess you get to see my graying Zappa.

A fly’s fate

I was upstairs a moment ago, checking on the fly lab. The students’ first fly cultures are looking good, we’ve got swarms of flies in bottles thriving, and soon we’ll be able to go on to the next phase of the experiment. I got to thinking, though, about flies and destiny. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a fruit fly.

You live in a thriving fly metropolis, surrounded by a mass of your peers buzzing and jostling each other, with your children frolicking under foot, burrowing through the tasty medium. Although it’s somewhat crowded, there’s plenty of food, and no predators. It’s a pleasant enough environment.

Then one day, a giant comes along and turns your city upside down, shaking all of the residents into a barren, empty bottle, nothing to eat, no offspring, just sterile glass all around. Your confusion is only brief, fortunately, because there’s a sickly sweet smell in the air, and everyone loses consciousness. One of three outcomes await you.

A. You awaken in a pristine paradise on a nice smooth bed. There’s plenty of food, and no overcrowding. You’re not alone, but it’s only a few of your peers around you. There’s room to dance and court and have sex! Your conditions are vastly improved. Bless you, kind giant.

B. You never wake up. Shortly after losing consciousness, your body slides into a vat of nearly pure alcohol, and you simultaneously drown and are poisoned, completely oblivious to your fate.

C. You stir back into consciousness to find yourself in a cluttered cavern, empty of food, but all around you are the dead husks of your fellow flies. You are tangled in a bit of silk, and you begin to struggle and flap your wings to escape. Little do you know, but the monster in the cave was ignoring you when you were motionless, but now your exertions have caught her attention, and you see eight eyes approaching and two needle-sharp fangs…you are paralyzed. You can feel your organs liquifying. Death is a relief.

Very, very few flies end up in A, and even there, the respite is temporary — they’ll meet their end in a few weeks. Right now, as the fly production ramps up, most are going to C, but later as populations get really large, most will go to B, since even now I’m getting as many flies as the spiders can eat.

It’s also almost entirely about luck. Flies that have obvious abnormalities or developmental issues or injuries don’t get picked for paradise, usually, but among the swarming majority of normies, it’s pure chance whether you get the reprieve — the overwhelming majority get either the poison bath or the chelicerae. It’s not fair. The universe is not fair. I imagine the flies in A consider themselves deserving of their good fortune, but they’re not — they just got lucky. For a little while.

Filthy dirty disease-carrying rat rampaging through New York!

Sarah Palin is suing the New York Times for libel, so she was in New York City for a court visit…which was postponed because she was diagnosed with COVID-19. Now you and I, if we found ourselves infectious with an unpleasant disease, would probably isolate ourselves at home to avoid passing it on to strangers or loved ones; I even have contingency plans for alternative methods of teaching if I should come down with it. But not Palin! She took that opportunity to go out to nice restaurants with people, all maskless, of course. It’s not as if anyone would expect her to be at all responsible.

It gets even worse than that, though. Her thuggish companions would rough up people who questioned the wisdom of her behavior.

A half dozen NYPD officers were called to Elio’s restaurant on Second Avenue Wednesday night after a man dining with the former Alaska Governor on the Upper East Side roughed up a news photographer filming them dining outdoors.

“Are any of you guys concerned she tested positive for covid?” he asked. The moment the words came out of the Upper East Site photographer’s mouth, the man put his napkin down, stands up and takes a beeline for him— menacingly asking “are you looking for trouble” over and over.

The unidentified, large man dining with Palin grabbed the victim’s fingers with both hands, wrenching and twisting them down, slamming the camera to the concrete, the photographer told Upper East Site

There’s video of the event. It’s a clear case of assault. The assailant (now identified as Ron Duguay) has not been arrested. Why not? Is this perfectly normal, that a celebrity dingbat can wander around New York, spewing viruses unchecked, and having anyone who questions the propriety of her behavior beaten up? Is this what “going rogue” means?

Sleep however you feel like

A while back, there was an idea that swept through social media that there is this thing called biphasic sleep. People naturally tend to wake up in the middle of the night, that historically there was a thing called “first sleep”, and then people would wake up around 2am and putter about and use their bedpans or pick up a quill pen and write a sonnet or whatever, and then go back to bed for “second sleep” before rising at cock-crow. I found this reassuring, because as I got older I was shifting from continuous night-time sleep to an interrupted sleep that fit that pattern. It’s OK! It’s not just age and stress, this is how humans are supposed to sleep, I could tell myself.

Hold it right there, not so fast: it’s probably not true. There isn’t one way you’re supposed to sleep.

But humans have never had a universal method of slumber. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.

Even within preindustrial Europe, sleep contained multitudes. Reviewing the diaries of European writers such as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Ekirch found several allusions to unified sleep. Summarizing this complicated literature, he told me that “patterns of sleep in non-Western cultures appear to have been much more diverse” than those in Europe, but that they were truly diverse everywhere.

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that biphasic sleep is like anarchical foraging: Both might have well served some ancient populations some of the time, but neither of them offers a clear solution to modern problems.

I find that even more reassuring. Don’t hold people to the one true way they’re supposed to do something, everyone is different, different cultures lead to different behaviors, and there’s nothing wrong with being a bi or a mono-sleeper. Individuals can even change! The only norm is that we have diverse patterns of activity.

Although “like a baby” is a pretty good ideal.

Friday Cephalopod: quite possibly non-Euclidean

You might be tempted to stare deeply into this image, trying to puzzle out what it is you’re looking at, but that’s how they get you.

That’s Haliphron, the 7-armed octopus, holding a jellyfish it’s been nibbling on. Now that I’ve told you, I hope that has broken the spell, and you’ll be able to escape. If not, well, a cephalopod has got to eat, and it’s next victim will by baffled by the way those twisting arms surround your face.