What happens when you put an incompetent engineer in charge of brain surgery?

I worked through my last two years of undergraduate college working as an assistant in an experimental animal surgery. Much of what we were doing was training medical students in basic surgical skills, and installing chronic implants for a neurophysiology department. What this involved was shaving animals, anesthetizing them, locking their heads into a stereotaxic device, and then handing them off to the experimenters. They’d cut open the scalp, drill holes into the skull, and then precisely and accurately lower electrodes into specific locations in the brain. Then either they or I would close up, which involved slathering dental acrylic over the apparatus and stitch the scalp closed. Finally, it was my job to take the animal away to a recovery room and take care of it post-op.

I’m just saying that this was over 40 years ago, but I do have some experience in this area. I assisted in these surgeries on hundreds of animals, cats, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, even goats a few times, and I can remember precisely three rabbits that died on the operating table (rabbits are what we called “friable”, fragile and easily killed by stress) and two cats who died of post-op distress and/or infections. Those were memorable to me because, as the post-op animal care guy, when there were problems I’d spend all night in the recovery room trying to nurse them back to health.

So this story about Musk’s Neuralink tells me that there is something seriously wrong. I’ll put it below the fold because it gets ugly. Seriously, my experience working with small animals was disturbing enough that I spent the rest of my career working on fish embryos and invertebrates, and I swore off doing research on mammals.

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Friday Cephalopod: It’s Octo-Easter!

It’s always silly how the Christian Easter holiday is so arbitrary and seemingly random, and engaged so many people in pointless mathematical calendrical exercises to figure out what day it falls on each year. Right now, I have no clue when it will be Easter this year, and you don’t need to tell me, because I don’t care and I don’t celebrate it.

So in the same spirit of random decisions, but with at least a little more simple predictability, I hereby declare that the first Sunday after Darwin’s birthday is Octo-Easter. Here are some Octo-Easter eggs for you all.

I suppose we could claim we’re celebrating the fecundity of the sea, or just the deep dark cold depths, or whatever. Don’t care. You can also celebrate it or don’t. That’s the nice thing about these freethought holidays, you’re free to think whatever you want about them.

OK, grandchildren, what have you done for me lately?

Rotten kids. They haven’t been rejuvenating me. That’s the message I get from one silly study.

Grandparents planning hefty amounts of childcare this half-term might want to think again after research claimed to disprove previous findings of a “rejuvenating effect” from looking after grandchildren.

Many studies have appeared to show mental and physical health advantages for those who care for their grandchildren. But none involved researchers talking to the same grandparents before and after their caregiving responsibilities began.

When the authors of Is There a Rejuvenating Effect of (Grand)Childcare? A Longitudinal Study, published this week in The Journals of Gerontology, did that, they found that caring for grandchildren failed to make grandparents feel any younger than their actual age.

Sorry, Iliana and Knut, you know I only visited you to leech youth-giving properties from you, like a vampire or Peter Thiel. Now I know it was all a sham, so I can stay home in the future.

The one interesting thing from the work is that it exposed selection bias in previous studies. Those studies compared how subjectively younger grandparents who took care of grandchildren felt, compared to those who didn’t. Aside from just the subjective evaluation of the effects, wouldn’t there be obvious bias in that you had to feel fairly healthy and vigorous to volunteer for child care in the first place? That’s hard work, yo. When they compared the same individuals before and after, the Fountain of Youth effect disappeared.

Surprise. I don’t even understand why this was considered a valid hypothesis in the first place, but then I’m not at all familiar with that literature.

You know, in all the times we’ve made the long trip to visit the grandkids, and all the times my wife has had extended stays to help with childcare, we’ve never once contemplated the peculiar notion that it might shave a few years of senescence off of us. Every trip back home we’re mainly dealing with tiredness, because the little ragamuffins can run us ragged.

We go because it makes us happy. Isn’t that enough?

Hey, Apple, could you be a little more predatory on your customers?

See that trivial little cable to the right? That’s Apple’s proprietary iPhone charging cable, and that’s the widget that’s going to drive me right out of the Apple ecosystem.

We already pay a premium for Apple products, which is kind of OK because they are very good, reliable devices. On top of that, though, Apple also wants to lock us into their cables — power cables, peripheral cables, you name it — and our devices can detect whether the cable we use to plug in our phones is an Official Approved Apple™ cable, and if they aren’t, they’ll refuse to connect. And sometimes, when you most need it, your phone will decide that the cable you are using is no longer up to its standards.

My wife and I are now down to ONE (1) functioning cable between us. I had to take it away because I need my phone to connect to any university services (that’s another gripe I’ll put off to another day), and I can’t trust it not to fail on me. I have bought so god-damn many phone cables because I’ve got maybe an 80% success rate in seeing a new cable work at all. All I could do is throw a fistful of unlikely cables at my wife as I was going out to work and suggest she try them and see if one magically works now.

My new requirement for my next phone is that it have a basic USB-C charging connector. Goodbye Apple, hello Android.

All aboard the pandemic roller-coaster!

I already told you my university is removing the vaccine mandate for attendance at large public events, and now the major cities are removing them, too.

Twin Cities Mayors Melvin Carter and Jacob Frey on Thursday jointly rescinded their vaccine-or-test emergency regulations for restaurants, bars and entertainment venues, effective immediately, as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations rapidly decline.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. This is bonkers. Yes, the numbers are going down, we’re past the peak, but look at the difference in the case rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

So we’re going to reduce the incentives for the unvaccinated to get vaccinated. These chickenshit politicians are calling it “invasive regulation”, when it’s a mundane public health measure, in the same way that we expect children to be vaccinated before they go off to school. It makes no sense. It’s pandering to Republicans.

Or maybe it’s something more nefarious. The Democrats see a way to reduce the number of Republican voters permanently. Hey, Mr MAGA Hat, please do cough and sneeze all over your friends at a rally, and while you’re at it, go play in traffic. We won’t get you all, but if we cripple you financially by throwing you on the mercies of your preferred health care system, or invalid you out with long COVID, we’ll be hampering your future effectiveness as a political force. <cackles evilly>

No, not really, I don’t endorse that. You’re already enough of a drag on society, and I don’t want to encourage a reservoir for new mutations to fester.

Meanwhile, as we wait for the next surge, here are some recommendations for you sensible people.

I’m using N94 & N95 masks entirely now. It’s kind of a shame, because last year there was a little cottage industry of artists making lovely cloth masks, but those are no longer recommended, unless worn as part of a set of layers. Things better not get so bad that I need a PAPR to go grocery shopping!

I also don’t understand the resistance to wearing masks. It’s -12°C and snowing with 55 km/hr winds here — even without a pandemic I’d be wearing a mask.

Kids, you’re our only hope

I’ve been noting for years that the Christian right has been highly effective at packing school boards and city councils with idiots, primarily people who have made the Bible or Capitalism their god. It’s a tactic that works, since it’s a way to let a minority’s nonsensical perspective dominate community life. It allows them to introduce the most astonishing — and illegal — bullshit into the public schools.

Between calculus and European history classes at a West Virginia public high school, 16-year-old Cameron Mays and his classmates were told by their teacher to go to an evangelical Christian revival assembly.

When students arrived at the event in the school’s auditorium, they were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, Mays said. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Those who did not follow the Bible would go to hell when they died, they were told.

This isn’t just a West Virginia thing. I’ve lost touch with my local public school since all my kids graduated and got the hell out of town, but the local schools would pull this kind of stunt all the time. There are traveling evangelical Christian groups all over this state that make money by billing schools to put on “wholesome” or “moral” assemblies — see You Can Run But You Cannot Hide ministries, which has the goal To reshape America by re-directing the current and future generations both morally and spiritually through education, media, and the Judeo-Christian values found in our U.S. Constitution. They’re a known hate group, but they still manage to slither into our schools, and he’s still got a Christian talk radio show.

What they don’t take into account, though, is we can still get the kids. They’re too smart, and can see right through all that.

The Huntington High School junior sent a text to his father.

“Is this legal?” he asked.

The answer, according to the U.S. Constitution, is no. In fact, the separation of church and state is one of the country’s founding basic tenets, noted Huntington High School senior Max Nibert.

“Just to see that defamed and ignored in such a blatant way, it’s disheartening,” he said.

Nibert and other Huntington students staged a walkout during their homeroom period Wednesday to protest the assembly. More than 100 students left their classrooms chanting, “Separate the church and state” and, “My faith, my choice.”

A West Virginia school had a walkout led by the students to protest the willful insertion of evangelical Christian propaganda in their school. Let that sink in, preachers. Your message isn’t persuading the youth, it’s alienating them. Good.