An amusing evo-psych put-down

From Kevin Bird:

“Postmodern NeoMarxist” is just an insult Jordan Peterson uses for anyone he dislikes. It’s another example of projection; you know how wingnuts like to claim that the libs call everyone a Nazi? The truth is that they like to call everyone a postmodernist or neo-Marxist.

Stephen Jay Gould is just an evo-psych boogeyman, and Geoffrey Miller is an ass. This is a great rebuttal, though:

Yep, spot on.

A productive weekend!

We vanished for the weekend and went out into the great wide world for a day and two nights. We got a lot done, even masked and avoiding most other human beings.

  • We visited our son Alaric in St Cloud. He’s doing well, his only complaint right now is that it’s impossible to get his hands on a PS5, which tells me he’s not facing any major worries right now.
  • We upgraded our phones, something we’ve put off for a few years, even as screens cracked and their batteries got weaker and weaker. We now get 5G, which is great, since it means our brains are also mutating to receive telepathic signals from the Pleiades, and our new third eyes are beginning to erupt. The downside: a few hours spent getting them all reconnected with our passwords.*
  • I got my birthday present. We stopped by Cabela’s and I got a pair of good hiking boots. Some of my pedal miseries lately have been a consequence of always picking up the cheapest pair of shoes possible, and wearing them to destruction (it doesn’t take all that long, cheap shoes last about a year). Now I’ve got a solid pair of boots with firm ankle support and a good fit. We’ll see if they help.
  • We visited our daughter, Skatje, in Wisconsin. She’s finishing up a PhD in computational linguistics, and her subspecialty is Russian. She’s not happy about the situation over there, but she’s very much into the Russian culture and language. So we had syrniki for breakfast. Do not speak to me of the decadent West, when Slavs eat fried cheesecake for breakfast.
  • Then of course we also played with Iliana all day long. I had forgotten how exhausting kids are at three.

Now we are home again. It’s time to get back into my mundane responsibilities.

*Passwords ought to be trivial, except I’m too old. I was an early adopter of the Mac (1984!) and signed up for mac.com network a few years later, which is now defunct. But every time I upgrade an Apple device, it insists on avidly taking up the mac.com network identity and telling me to log in to an extinct service in order to prove I am who I say I am.

Learning more about Russia than I expected

Today, I have ended up in Wisconsin, just for the day, and I thought it was going to be time to play with a 3-year-old. But hey, here’s an interview with Stephen Kotkin that I thought was a solid overview of the Russian perspective. And it turns out my daughter Skatje is a moderator for r/russian, and knows a fair bit about the language. I should have expected that, since she’s working on a PhD in computational linguistics and specializes in the Russian language. Russian is close enough to Ukrainian that she can read that, too.

Anyway, I’m busy for a day. Three year olds are not that interested in Russian politics.

Russia has wacky conspiracy theorists, too?

If you spread kooky nonsensical ideas, you’re likely to be infected with them too.

I’m having a tough time pitying them now.

Damn homeopathy

Here’s a one-minute horror story, and a novel (to me) rationalization for quackery.

The patient thinks that it is good that her breast lump has erupted into a bleeding, rotting mass, because that’s a sign that the homeopathic treatments were working, rather than failing. Yikes.

P.S. Important: in the name of all that is holy, do not Google “fungating”. It is not a portmanteau of “fun” and “gating” — the derivation is from “fungal”, and you do not want to see a breast with a fungating mass. It is horrifying to consider that so many people in human history have died of this ghastly disease.

And that is a multi-millennial horror story.

It’s “SPRING” BREAK!

I get a whole week off! I’ll use that time to catch up on grading and get a few lectures ahead, of course. It’s not like I’m going to be frolicking in the sunshine.

-17°C right now. I wasn’t wearing enough layers this morning and really felt it.

We are going to do one thing fun, though: we’re driving east today, stopping for a brief while in St Cloud to visit Eldest Son, then off to Wisconsin to visit Youngest Granddaughter for a day. I may overdose on cuteness for the weekend.

Oldest Boy is adorable. Granddaughter is pretty sweet, too.

PowerPoint is a tool for blaming faculty

It’s true. It’s never the administration’s fault, always the faculty.

That last line is too true. I suspect many mathematics professors feel that their discipline has been relegated to working as a service that gives basic training to the “sexier”, more popular majors, like chemistry, biology, and computer science. I hope this satire doesn’t give any administration the idea of merging math with accounting to save money. Quick, let them know that the mathematicians are all playing around with Greek letters and don’t know anything about arithmetic!

Oh, wait, let’s not forget, McSweeney’s is poking fun at the dismissal of history.

That is all correct. The Tulsa Massacre is depressing, and the English Civil Wars? Go ahead, ask any American who won it, and they won’t have a clue. They won’t even be able to name which side was which.

I have suddenly realized that the PowerPoint slides I use for genetics are also incredibly bland. Am I going to have to worry about my job? Please don’t merge biology with health services!