Too many spiders?

A colleague found this lovely grass spider scampering about the hallways, and she brought it to me (this is a routine event every Fall). I happily took it and brought it home, in my left hand.

Then as I was leaving the science building, I spotted a lovely bold jumper on the glass door. Of course I caught it in my right hand.

I’m hurrying home with spiders in each hand, and when I got home, there was a zebra jumper waiting on the door. I thought about pulling a Darwin and popping one of them into my mouth so I could catch the third, but I didn’t want to traumatize any of the spiders, so the zebra jumper was let off, and is having a lovely time in the garden, where all of them eventually ended up.

Campus drama

We had some drama among the music faculty and students the other day. We had a stabbing.

According to the criminal complaint, police were called to the University of Minnesota Morris’s Humanity and Fine Arts building just after 4 p.m. on a report of a stabbing.

A witness led the officer to a room where the victim, identified as a percussion instructor at the school, was bleeding and suffering from an injury to the arm. The witness told police that the victim had come to his office with “blood everywhere” and identified Cusey as the suspect.

A student, Alexander William Cusey, had attacked one of our instructors for reasons that are unclear.

In the hospital, Cusey told the doctor that he was “trying to kill my percussion instructor” and that he “stabbed my pinky a little bit,” according to the complaint.

He also told an officer that the instructor was a “goodie two shoes” and described the stabbing as “thrilling” and “hilarious.”

Cusey allegedly added that he had had previous violent fantasies involving his parents and his high school.

I don’t recognize the student, but then he was working on the opposite side of campus. I don’t think he’s at all representative of our student body, and clearly has some issues.

At least I can say our administration responded decisively — Mr Cusey was immediately arrested, is currently in jail awaiting trial, and won’t be returning to campus.

The ugliest woman in the news

Megyn Kelly. She’s hideous. She has a rotting, diseased brain behind that shiny façade.

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total, not seven, and enjoyed it because — I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal. She’s extremely beefy in her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes. Admired, wanted, some women even foolishly say loved by these guys at Cornell. But this is probably a first for her. She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.

I’m not trying to be insulting. I’m just trying to tell you the narrative that is likely to have occurred here, in my opinion. And why can’t we account for that possibility? That the girl who was never the most sought after suddenly had four guys who wanted to have sex with her. And she counted this, yeah, in her inebriated state, as a win and liked the feeling of being sexy and desired and wanted. It happens. Sorry, it does. And that’s why she kept saying yes.

Why do we have to go right to she’s a victim? Even she took weeks to get there. It wasn’t until they told her she couldn’t go to the party. We all know that. Right? This is so disempowering to all of womankind, to all of us, to our daughters. We are capable of making decisions. She made the decision to drink and then show up at a fraternity house at 11 o’clock.

Interesting. Megyn Kelly was repeatedly sexually harassed by the odious Roger Ailes and kept quiet about it for 10 years. From this we can infer that she was thrilled to be groped by this specimen.

Say hi to Tammy Faye…in Hell

Jim Bakker is dead. Remember him for his accomplishments.

Bakker was convicted after a ‌six-week trial in federal court on all 24 fraud and conspiracy charges brought against him. Prosecutors said he defrauded followers of $158m by selling promises of lifetime annual vacations that he could not provide. They said he siphoned $3.7m to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds, servants – and an air-conditioned dog house.

Religion really helps skim off $158 million. That’s its primary virtue.

His legacy? Buckets of freeze-dried, powdered apocalypse food to fuel the doomsday he experienced today.

The scariest thing I’ve seen this Hallowe’en season

Yikes. An anhydrous ammonia leak. Look at all the people fleeing!

That stuff will kill you, burning out your eyes and lungs. And it’s everywhere where agriculture is practiced. We’ve got tanks of it stored just outside of town, and whenever I’m stuck at a railroad crossing, I see the tank cars full of that stuff rolling by, and I wonder what I’d do if the train derailed right in front of me. Die, probably, painfully. I doubt that I could outrun the cloud of ammonia.

Who needs ghosts and witches and monsters when we’ve got modern industrial farming? Go ahead, read some accident reports to give yourself nightmares.

It looks like it’s Nobel season

The winners of the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine have been announced: it’s Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann, for their work in optogenetics.

Back in my day, we’d have to pull a fine glass electrode and jab it into a cell to put an electrical current in it, and see what twitched or secreted or changed gene expression in response. It was admittedly a bit clumsy and had side effects: most of the cells I stabbed would die in response. Optogenetics lets a researcher modify the genetics of precursor cells so that they would produce a novel channel, a light sensitive rhodopsin derived from algae, that lurked in the membrane, and would only open when a light was shone on it. Instead of a needle, you could aim a laser at the cell, and trigger a current across the membrane non-invasively.

It’s a neat trick. You can have a whole nervous system laid out on your microscope, loaded with inherited copies of this rhodopsin, and cruise around zapping cells with a beam of light, and see what happens when those cells are stimulated. Or put a fiber optic in a brain and switch on neurons with a pulse of light. There are so many fun things to do!

Have you ever heard of BBM?

That’s Brown Brothers Media, and you’ve probably read some of their articles. They produce Space Daily, which I’ve encountered a few times, and a hodge-podge of other online ‘journals’, like Scandinavian Standard, Silicon Canals, Sentient Blogs, The Law Dictionary, Science Blog, Mars Daily, Solar Daily, and Nuclear Power Daily, as well as a lot of squishy pop psychology sites, and even one titled Bible Scriptures. They are indiscriminate in the topics they claim to cover, and churn out a tremendous volume of articles that they feed into the Google mill.

How do they do that? They’re based in South East Asia, and they started by hiring low-cost regional writers who could churn out articles with little research, but then they ended up firing most of them and going even cheaper.

“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”

At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.

“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”

The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism, their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)

They’re not done. They’re branching out into technology companies that produce more AI dreck.

The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.

Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”

Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”

Look forward to even more slop on the web. They are pumping out so much garbage, that they aren’t even bothering to proofread anymore. Why should they? It’s not as if quality matters in their content.

Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”

At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.

I guess you can’t trust anything you read on the internet. At the very least you should avoid anything on this list of every known BBM publication.

Vox Day responds to my criticism of his refutation of evolution

Ted Beale and the books he hasn’t read

Not really. My criticism was that his math was invalid and that he thinks evolution is a simple serial process (the same thing Zach Hancock pointed out), but he ignores that and instead asserts that he is a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting. He has donned the armor of impenetrable narcissism. As usual, it is his own words that demolish him.

Shows what I know, though. He’s got Jesus backing him.

And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.

Can we be done with Vox Day now?

This is not a competition, but I debunked Vox Day’s stupid evolution “disproof” in one fairly short written post. If you want a lot more, Gutsick Gibbon has put up a 3½ hour video that makes the same criticisms at greater length and with more math from Zach Hancock.

I listened to the whole thing while working on class stuff…at 1.5x speed. It was good, if verbose, but as someone who is not a population geneticist, I did learn a few details, so that was worthwhile. I haven’t been following her series with the creationist Will Duffy, because I’m on of those people who think he is disingenuous and dishonest, and he’s not worth the time, and I also think those videos are poor representatives of good science communication (way too long, with way too much time given to the lying twit), and I’d rather see videos like this one, where two smart educated people have a conversation. But apparently, Erika’s mother likes them, so that’s reason enough to keep doing them.

It’s not just Cornell

Dispiriting news from my alma mater: University of Oregon receives five sexual assault reports within first week of classes.

Students began the fall term at the University of Oregon in Eugene on Monday. But by midday on Wednesday, university officials sent out a community safety warning about five reported sexual assault attacks on or near campus in the past week.

According to the safety alert, officials said four of the incidents involved university students, and the fifth occurred near the Alton Baker Dog Park, adjacent to campus. They said police arrested someone in the fifth case and that all students affected have been offered university support resources.

The UO must still be on the quarter system if classes start this late (we’ve been open for about 6 weeks already). This sounds familiar and universal, though. The school year starts, a lot of new students arrive, free of familiar constraints, and the asshole fraction of students (often frat boys) take advantage in horrible ways. I hope my former university follows through and culls the student body of these jerks, rather than giving them another chance to abuse. They should know that this behavior is not permissible or forgivable.

In case you didn’t know, the movie Animal House was set at the University of Oregon, in an actual frat house I lived several blocks away, on E 13th, and remember seeing the rather dilapidated old house, before it was finally torn down about the time I graduated. Tearing it down was probably a wise decision — it represented a poor example.

I spent my first semester at the university working too hard and earning straight As. Too many students think university is time to party. Tell your friends and family it’s not.