Texas School Boards are the problem

Just listen to this Texas school board member to see why.

He doesn’t want his school district to become anything like the Houston school district, and the only thing he can suggest is the cause of the difference is…Houston schools have a lot of black teachers. I guess the way to fix the schools is to only hire white teachers.

This is the kind of person who poisons schools all across the country.

Time to breathe

I’ve got everything done for the first week of classes. Lecture prepped, lab instructions posted, flies flourishing, syllabus done, first problem set written and posted, everything. Everything!

Now savoring the moment. This is probably the very last time I’ll be all caught up until May. I’d do something to celebrate except there’s a pandemic and I’m on an Only Bad Food diet and most of the spiders are frozen and the whole world sucks.

Every billionaire is a con artist

And there are few more phony than Elon Musk. Here’s a good interview with Edward Niedermeyer, who has written a book about the way Musk built a car company on some good engineering (not done by him) and a whole lot of lies (his contribution). In particular, his so-called self-driving cars are killing people.

People such as Walter Wong and Josh Brown have died. The Tesla fans blame them. And Tesla basically says, These people chose to be distracted. They chose to operate the system in a place we told them isn’t necessarily safe for it. Therefore, it’s all on them. And the NTSB said, No. We know from literally decades of behavioral psychology—particularly those that look at safety critical systems and partial automation—that if you put someone in what’s called a vigilance task, where they’re just monitoring this automation, and they just have to be there to jump in and take over when something goes wrong, which over time gets more and more rare, it is not a question of good drivers doing okay and bad drivers doing poorly. It’s not the same as driving. It’s a task fundamentally different from driving. It’s one that we as humans are actually less well evolved to do than unassisted driving. There’s no moral or skill factor in this. Inevitably, every human who is put in that position will eventually, given enough time, become inattentive, then given enough time, the system will find something it can’t deal with. Basically, people are gambling with these sorts of numbers. They’re playing roulette in a way.

That’s an interesting point. Our brains don’t have a good autopilot — our attentiveness tends to wane if we aren’t seen constant feedback to keep us tuned in. I know that when I’m on a long distance drive, my brain needs constant reminders to refocus and stay in the present and the task at hand. If I don’t have that, I know I’ll lapse into daydreaming and thinking about totally irrelevant stuff.

I suppose if we had a really good self-driving system, we could replace the need for minute-by-minute attention to the road with a system that delivered random electric shocks with a voice over saying “wake up, dummy”, but I don’t think it would sell well, and if mandatory, would fuel a robust market in YouTube videos instructing you in how to rip it out.

When Elon Musk promotes self-driving cars, though, he’s being openly fraudulent.

For me, this is where Tesla crosses into unambiguous fraud. First of all, it’s Level 5 autonomy, which you have to understand nobody in the space is pursuing. Level 5 means fully autonomous, with no need for human input ever. But operating anywhere—basically anywhere in the United States, anywhere a human could drive, this system needs to be able to drive. This is the core of its appeal as much as, Oh, we’re developing this generalized system. Everyone else is tied to these local operating domains with mapping and all this other stuff, more expensive vehicles. We don’t have time to get into all of the ways in which this is an absolute fantasy. Anybody who’s serious in the AV sector is just amazed that this even has as much credibility as it does. What it comes down to is that he’s identified not a plausible fraud or vision that he is selling, but an appealing one. People believe it because they want to believe it. They want to believe that they can buy a car—it gets back to that frisson of futurism—without having to change any behavior. You’re just gonna go out and buy another car. It’s gonna belong to you like any other car. But unlike other cars, it’s going to drive itself anywhere and everywhere. And that’s absurd. With a camera-only system, technically, people call it AI. People call it machine learning. Fundamentally, it’s probabilistic inference. And when you think about that term, probabilistic inference, you think about something that could kill you at any second. Does it sound like a good combination?

No, it doesn’t. That’s a terrifying combination. Even worse, imagine being on a freeway with thousands of other cars, all relying on those odds. That’s not just you rolling the dice, that’s everyone doing it simultaneously, trusting that no one will get snake-eyes.

This is the principle that drives the profitability of casinos. Even tiny advantages in the odds of a chance event, when iteratively repeated by a great many people, converges on inevitability. Hey, that’s also a factor in understanding evolution!

RationalWiki does film criticism?

I’m glad they do, or I wouldn’t realize that some people think Blazing Saddles is “One of the greatest conservative movies of all time!”

The basic problem with conservatives claiming that Blazing Saddles is a conservative film, rather than an anti-racist film, is that it relies on conflating political correctness with liberalism and political incorrectness with conservativism. Political correctness is an ideology-based concept that varies by ideology, for example Conservapedia has nearly completely banned the use of certain terminology (e.g., the near-total ban of the acronym ‘BCE’ and the word ‘fuck’, the latter excepted in rare cases when quoting people they hate[23]) and the banning of certain concepts such as support of evolution (despite it being supported by the Catholic Church since 1950). As the film itself demonstrates, one can use ‘politically incorrect’ terminology in the service of a larger lesson.

They also hate ligatures, which is why I always refer to it as Conservapædia.

Anyway, RationalWiki provides a thorough exegesis of the movie, maybe too thorough — it’s the place to go if you need every single joke in the movie explained. Like if you’re a right-wing “comedian”.

I have far more respect for students than I do for school administrators

It gives me some hope for the future, it does. Students are leading the way and walking out of NY schools.

Students at several high schools in New York City coordinated a walkout from classes on Tuesday to call for remote learning as they protest what they say are unsafe learning conditions inside school buildings as COVID cases surged just as the spring semester began last week.

A campaign mounted by students and activists across some of New York’s best-known high schools – including Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and Stuyvesant – led to a walkout shortly before noon on Tuesday.

While precise numbers were not immediately available, organizers estimated hundreds of students participated, with about 400 students walking out at Brooklyn Tech alone.

Those are smart students.

I’ve been busy revamping my upcoming genetics course for that kind of eventuality. I’m less concerned about the administration putting us in lockdown (if that happens, it means students are dropping dead in the hallways), or about a mass walkout by the students, than I am with individual students having to drop out for a few days or weeks at a time to deal with their own illness, or family emergencies. I know that’s going to happen. It happened last semester, it happened last year. It’s going to happen some more this spring. So I’m putting a lot of work into revising the course to incorporate more flexibility.

There’s a limit to how much flexibility I can program in, though. There is a breaking point where I’ll be the one walking out.

It’s good to be a vegetarian

I had no idea that there was another epidemic here in the US: a food safety problem, the spread of a strain of multi-drug resistant salmonella through domestic poultry. I thought the combination of CDC and USDA oversight was effective in keeping our food safe, but I guess not.

With a public health threat unfolding across the country, you might have expected federal regulators to act swiftly and decisively to warn the public, recall the contaminated poultry and compel changes at chicken plants. Or that federal investigators would pursue the root cause of the outbreak wherever the evidence led.

None of that happened.

Instead, the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closed the outbreak investigation nine months later even though people were continuing to get sick. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry, was not only powerless to act but said nothing to consumers about the growing threat. So supermarkets and restaurants continued selling chicken tainted with drug-resistant infantis.

And they continue to do so today.

An eight-month ProPublica investigation into this once rare, but now pervasive form of salmonella found that its unchecked spread through the U.S. food supply was all but inevitable, the byproduct of a baffling and largely toothless food safety system that is ill-equipped to protect consumers or rebuff industry influence.

It’s a good if rather distressing article, but I have to warn you that even without thinking about salmonella, the graphics of commercial chicken processing are…well, um, graphic. Where I live, I’m surrounded by chicken and turkey farms that look rather innocuous as we drive by — long low sheds packed full of birds hidden from sight where, apparently horrors take place. It will definitely put you off chicken.

The other night I fixed chicken tikka masala, without the chicken. We used tofu instead. I think it was a wise choice.

We vegetarians are just totally safe, except for the lettuce and Listeria and E. coli. Yeah. No worries at all.

Classes resume one week from today

I’d like to know how someone smuggled a camera into my classroom to record our interactions in the future.

I’m not at all concerned about urine drinking going on, but I feel like I need to pass a rule prohibiting breathing, just to be safe. At the very least, NO SINGING.

When life gives you a pandemic, make lemonade

I’ve lost of all the quack remedies for COVID that have been invented by grifters: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bleach, betadine, etc. Here’s one we could have predicted — urine. There’s a weird fringe of urine-drinkers who have been around for a long time, so it’s unsurprising they were ready to leap into the fray.

Anti-COVID-19 “Vaccine Police” leader Christopher Key has a new quarter-baked conspiracy theory for his anti-vax followers to use to cure themselves of COVID-19: Drink their own urine. “The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need,” Key said in a video posted over the weekend on his Telegram account after being released from jail over a trespassing charge. “This has been around for centuries,” he added. “When I tell you this, please take it with a grain of salt,” the anti-vaccine advocate warned while saying people might now think he is “cray cray.” “Now drink urine!” he continued. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” he concluded. “I drink my own urine!” Reached for comment by The Daily Beast on Sunday night, Key doubled down on what he calls “urine therapy” and railed against “foolish” people who took the COVID-19 vaccine, which is safe and effective.

Oh, you think that’s awful? Here’s something worse.

Never take a popsicle or a glass of lemonade from a stranger, and don’t let your kids take drinks from their weird friends.

The Institute for Creation research has a new logo!

Good work, design team!

After 52 years of fruitful ministry, the Institute for Creation Research is renewing its commitment to rigorous scientific research that affirms the truth of Scripture. As a staff, we’re delighted to reveal a new logo that reflects our mission and highlights an exciting field of research.

It certainly does reflect their mission and their rigorous scientific research.

They’ve got it backwards. That’s a left-handed spiral, DNA has a right-handed spiral.

Kudos!

(This is a fairly common mistake in commercial art, but it’s a bit incongruous in an organization that’s bragging about their scientific rigor.)*

*(Which they lack, anyway.)