A time to talk & think about something other than genetics

I’m going to be pumping out these genetics videos three times a week (!), but they’re really not intended to be popular fodder that will generate hordes of clicks and views. I’ve intentionally put title screens on them that are horribly bland, because they’re really intended for my students. I’m also so tired from keeping up with my classes every day — in part because I decided to restructure and rewrite the entire semester — that I’ve had trouble planning anything outside of class. So, just to keep my channel alive, I’m going to try something structureless and informal — I’ll just ramble for an hour or so on Friday night and see if anything interesting dribbles out of my mouth. Tomorrow, then, I’ll turn a webcam on my homely face and talk for a while, without much preparation.

As you can see, I want to kick Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson a bit more, but also there’s this new paper on the evolution of the inner ear in bats, so I intend to say a few things about it off the cuff. Or about whatever else springs into my tired brain.

Will this finally kill Jordan Peterson’s career? No, it will not.

That’s quite a list of critics of the Rogan/Peterson circle jerk. All these people with relevant, advanced degrees in climatology are explaining that Peterson is childishly inaccurate and foolish, as if maybe at some point people will wake up and realize that he is a lying incompetent.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick:

“He seems to think we model the future climate the same way we do the weather. He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.

“He has no frickin’ idea,” she said.

Dr Gavin Schmidt:

“Guys, for the love of everything holy, please, please, have somebody on who knows what the heck a climate model is!!!”

Schmidt told the Guardian he was reminded of a quote from the famous British statistician George Box.

“Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’,” Schmidt said.

Prof Steve Sherwood:

Peterson was “making the ancient climate sceptic error of mixing up weather and climate”.

“Anyone who has taken an introductory course in climate or atmospheric science would spot this problem,” he said. “Errors in a weather forecast indeed accumulate such that after a couple of weeks the forecast is useless.”

But with climate, Sherwood said, the models work differently to project how the climate will respond to different factors, such as higher levels of CO2.

“[Peterson’s] argument is like saying we can’t predict whether a pot of water on a flame will boil, because we decide in advance what variables to put in our model, and can’t predict each bubble.”

Prof Christian Jakob:

Peterson’s comments were “ill-informed” and that he’d “mixed up weather prediction with climate projections.

“People are entitled to their opinions, but science and climate modelling isn’t about opinion. If you’re not well informed about how something is done then it’s not right to make comments about it on a large platform.”

Prof Michael Mann:

Peterson’s comments – and Rogan’s facilitation of them – was an “almost comedic type of nihilism” that would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Peterson’s claim that the climate was too complicated showed “a total lack of understanding of how science works” and could be used to dismiss physics, chemistry, biology, “and every other field of science where one formulates conceptual models”, according to Mann.

“Every great discovery in science – including the physics that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast their ridiculous conversation – has arisen through that process,” he said.

Prof John Abraham:

the episode was “a word salad of nonsense spoken by people who have no sense when it comes to climate.”

“To say that climate model errors increase like compound interest is laughable. Jordan Peterson displays a near complete misunderstanding of climate change, and the tools climate scientists use to understand what is happening to our planet.

“It’s as if someone, with zero expertise and knowledge, made comments about something he knows little about.”

You know, people have been blasting this message since he first squelched his way into the public consciousness with his wrong interpretations of an anti-discrimination law, his wrong explanations of gender, his wrong ideas about evolution and neuroscience, his wrong notions of epidemiology and disease, all undergirded by his wrong opinions about religion and supernatural phenomena, and his foundation in the wrong ideas about psychology (his profession!) built on a bizarre Jungian framework. His audience doesn’t seem to care. They just seem to like that he’s blissfully confident about his wrongness, and that’s what they love about him.

Disappeared

Worker Hammering Square Peg into Round Hole — Image by ©Images.com/Corbis

So this is how the gender-critical fascists are going to handle trans men and women: by simply denying that they exist, insisting that their identity and perspectives and history must be consumed by the ravenous Gender Binary.

I know how this will go. Humans are binary. If you don’t fit our definition of the gender binary, you must not be human. Therefore, we can do with you what we will. It’s eliminationist logic through and through.

And seriously, Ms Dansky, if you’re asked to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, and are getting the approval of Carlson, Fox News, and his audience, you ought to be questioning your life choices.

This is too true.

The cats are running the show

You should be outraged at Tennessee schools banning Maus. I know I am.

A school district in Tennessee banned the use of “Maus,” a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, in its middle school classes, citing the work’s profanity and nudity in a 10-to-0 vote.

As leaders in conservative areas across the country push for more control over the way history is taught, the McMinn County school board expressed concern that the expletives in “Maus” were inappropriate for eighth-graders. Members also said Art Spiegelman’s illustrations showing nudity — which depict Holocaust victims forced to strip during their internment in Nazi concentration camps — were improper.

How do you show the horror of the Holocaust in a “proper” way? You just have to sanitize out the “horror” part? That’s the whole point of educating kids about this event — you have to make it clear that this wasn’t a trivial, fun, amusing event. You can’t clean it up. It’s why Spiegelman has refused to turn it into a movie.

The school board’s objections are ludicrous. It’s got expletives in it — have they ever listened to eighth-graders? As a kid, I didn’t learn dirty words from a book, or my family, I got them from my peers. The naughty words in Maus are relatively tame against the magnitude of the nightmare going on around the characters. Nudity? Hah. People being forced to line up for mandatory showers (does the school district have communal showers in their PE building?) or piles of naked corpses are not images that will make the kids think of forbidden sexy times.

The most chilling part of the article, though, is the mention of the “10-to-0 vote”. No one on that school board was principled enough to speak out against the banning, the whole board was depressingly uniform in their views. That speaks to the effectiveness of the deranged Right in infiltrating our civic life to take control and further poison our communities with their oppressive ideas. We have seen the same phenomenon in the teaching of creationism — the teachers are dead set against it, many of the citizens don’t want it, the institutions of higher learning all reject it and say teaching it is a waste of time, but all you need is a bloc of churches voting to pack the board, and they can dominate.

Good luck, people of McMinn County, Tennessee. You’ve been fucked over.

Long day ahead

I keep telling my students about what I call Fly Time — the idea that these genetic experiments we’re doing require that we carry out the steps on the fly’s schedule, which may sometimes be inconvenient for the human experimenter. We’ll be flexible, but the work does require doing things outside the formally scheduled class time. That’s about to bite me in the butt.

We had this minor fire yesterday that canceled labs for the day. But we’re on Fly Time! They don’t care about our lab schedule! I’ve got a big plan that requires starting on time, and if we don’t begin the experiment this week it won’t culminate before spring break. I can’t compel students to stay and do lab work over their break, so if it runs over…I’m the guy who has to do all the final fly counts in the experiment. The students need to start the cross this week!

To accommodate our students’ busy schedules, I get to spend today in the fly lab helping a string of students coming in on Student Time to learn fly husbandry. All day long. Parked in a lab as students dribble in. Except for the time I get to spend lecturing them in class. And then I come home and put the recording of the lecture together and upload it. I also have to assemble a new problem set and post it on Canvas. Maybe if there’s a gap in the stream of students I can do that during the day?

Ha ha. The flexibility I’m trying to build into the course is coming out of my hide. There better not be any more fires this semester.

Dear god, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are such pompous know-nothings

Behold, two idiots talking.

There is no such thing as climate. Climate and everything are the same word. That’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like — this is something that bothers me about technically, it’s like climate is about everything. OK. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. That means you reduce the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well, how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

  • Climate is not about “everything”. Let’s look it up on Wikipedia, since Peterson didn’t even do that much.

    Climate is the long-term pattern of weather in an area, typically averaged over a period of 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, which includes the ocean, land, and ice on Earth.

    So not “everything”.

  • Yes, climate is modeled. The relevant variables are assessed by knowledgeable experts, not muscle-bound blatherers or disgraced freaky Jungian psychologists.
  • Models are constantly assessed against ongoing observations and measurements. Predictions are made and tested. That’s what we use to measure their validity.
  • No model can include “everything”. That’s why it is a model. You can’t just make a blanket dismissal of all models solely because they’re models. That’s like throwing out psychology because it doesn’t account for every neuron and every variable in physiology.

Remember: Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100 fucking million dollars to broadcast on their network. Peterson was getting paid $200 fucking thousand per month for just his clinical practice, which I presume he gave up because he’s earning more from his speeches and books.

Fuck both of these guys.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

I said I was going to optimize my classroom management for flexibility, but this is ridiculous. I’m supposed to be teaching a lab right now, but the science building caught fire.

It was more of a tiny smolder, but we did get a lot of smoke in the building. I heard that plumbers were soldering some pipes in the ceiling, and something caught fire, and now the fire department kicked everyone out of the building and are trying to make sure there is nothing else burning in that space before they let us back in. “A few more hours,” the fire person said. So I had to cancel lab.

Now the next few days are wrecked for me, because I’m trying to accommodate a lot of busy students and persuade them to come in at some other time so we can get this cross started. I’m going to have to provide supervised lab access all day tomorrow and Thursday.

I swear, this job is trying to break me, but honestly, I’m already broken.

A lighter moment

Or is it? This is a midwest horror film.

22 years ago, I moved here from Philadelphia — which is kind of the antithesis of Minnesota. It was scary how nice everyone was when we moved in.

There are regional differences, though. That video is clearly from a Wisconsinite perspective. Minnesotans don’t talk about brats and the Packers, it’s all hot dish and the Vikings, and more purples than greens. We’re also a little less nasal and a bit more sing-songy.