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!

Don’t forget the pandemic, you all!

I know it’s easy to do — so many distractions! And the powers-that-be are eager for you to cast all caution to the winds! — but this is an ongoing, world-changing catastrophe. So here’s a refresher.

The global COVID-19 death toll may be three times higher than official tallies suggest, according to a systematic analysis of excess mortality during the pandemic.

From Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021, global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 17.9-19.6), Haidong Wang, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and the COVID-19 Excess Mortality Collaborators reported in The Lancet.

India had the highest number of excess deaths (4.07 million, 95% UI 3.71-4.36), an estimated eight times higher than its 489,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, which was followed by the U.S. (1.13 million, 95% UI 1.08-1.18), where the official count reached 824,000 by the end of 2021.

Just remember, human beings, we can deal with more than one problem at once. It’s hard, but problems don’t disappear when a new one rises up.

Shut up about Joro Spiders, already

OK, enough with the spider freakout. I’ve been rolling my eyes so hard for the last few weeks that my ocular muscles are sprained. I’m talking about headlines like this:

Don’t journalists have a few other things they should be concerned about right now? This isn’t one of them. This is a great big nothingburger, unless you’re concerned about invasive species and the fate of their naturalized cousin spider, Trichonephila clavipes, which has been here in the southeast US for over a century, is about the same size as Trichonephila clavata (the Joro spider), and is just as harmless.

Oh, you’re not? Then shut the fuck up.

These are big spiders, but T. clavata is harmless. They’ll eat big bugs, but have no interest in you and can’t even bite through your skin. They’re also about the same size as Argiope, which we have in huge numbers up here in Minnesota, but T. clavata is only slightly more cold resistant than T. clavipes and has the potential to slightly extend their range. I only regret that I probably won’t find any way up here in the North.

But so what? Here’s where T. clavipes lives now (in blue), and where T. clavata has been found (in red). Don’t panic. They’re big, but they’re beautiful, and they’ll eat lots of grasshoppers and stinkbugs. Welcome them!

Read this for the True Facts.

Just so you know: last summer, we transplanted several Argiope from the edge of town to our natural garden in our backyard. They did well! I was a little concerned that we wouldn’t have enough food for them — I usually find them in open fields that are swarming with grasshoppers — but the female and male pair were thriving all through August, before they disappeared, as Argiope usually does when the weather cools. We’re hoping they managed to produce an egg sac or two to overwinter, which, with a little luck, will lead to clouds of little baby spiders ballooning over the neighborhood, and a repopulation of our garden. This is nothing to be feared! They’re gorgeous animals.

It’s unlikely that they’ll populate most of the yards in our neighborhood, unfortunately. Lawns are bad. They don’t produce enough big insect biomass to feed these animals.

The standard of humor on YouTube must be really low

A guy decided to do a “prank” in a university classroom, I presume to get clicks. I was curious to see the level of humor behind this prank, and here it is:

He walks into a lecture hall as if he is an enrolled student (he isn’t), pulls out a typewriter, and starts banging on it while occasionally yelling at the professor to speak up.

After leaving the lecture hall to retrieve his typewriter, Adams then entered the room a second time. He continued to type loudly and shouted, “Professor can you repeat that last part real quick?” A woman speaking from the front of the room, whom The Harvard Crimson identified as a professor named Hopi E. Hoekstra, could be seen telling Adams, “You’re being incredibly disrespectful and incredibly disruptive of this class.”

Adams’ bag and typewriter were confiscated again by the professor, and when Adams left the room, he was told by a second man that university police had been called to the scene.

Adams could then be seen walking outside the building when he encountered a man who appeared to be a campus police officer. The man asked Adams if he was a student at Harvard. When Adams said he wasn’t, the man said, “You shouldn’t enter any Harvard buildings if you’re not affiliated.”

The Harvard Crimson reported that Berry asked staff to call the Harvard University Police Department, who arrived after the YouTuber had left the lecture hall.

At the end of the video, Adams said, “I feel like that went as horrible as it could have and also as best as it could have,” adding, “I literally didn’t do nothing. I mean, I guess I was being annoying, but I’m always annoying.”

That’s it. Is that funny? It sounds like a guy disrupting a class, nothing more. It barely even constitutes a “prank”.

I found his video about this “prank” on YouTube.

3 million views.

Fuck me. It’s just monetized assholery.