To an embryologist, everything looks a bit eggy

This is a nice micrograph of an ascidian egg. A very large egg.

That is definitely the sperm entry point there in the lower half, so it’s apparently a freshly fertilized zygote at this point.

Wait, no, that’s not an egg! It’s Jupiter! I wonder when it will start to gastrulate? I don’t want to be around when it reaches the tadpole larva stage and starts swimming away.

There’s a whole series of Hubble images of the outer planets. Uranus and Neptune are rather blurry, but a very pretty robin’s egg blue, which means obviously that when they hatch they’re going to start screeching to be fed, which will be a bit terrifying, especially when their mama flies back to the solar system.

Not a great weekend

It’s unhappy news all around. This weekend was the time of the Big Cleanup, when I go through all the spiderling vials and cull out the sickly and the spiders who did not make it — I don’t if it’s me or just the expected mortality for any species that spews out progeny hundreds at a time, but I’ve only got a 30% survival rate. It was kind of expected, but it still hurts when you’re going through all the babies you nurtured for over a month, and well over half are dead. At least the survivors got bumped up to larger living quarters and get more flies to eat.

Then, going through my adult colony, two of them had died, for no discernable cause. I think they looked up, noticed we’re almost to December in Minnesota, and decided it was totally unnatural for them to live through this, and decided it was time to die. I saw this last year. Midwinter is like the expiration date for these northern spiders.

Then, just to add more misery to the tragedy, my camera is acting up — it refused to take any pictures, told me it had lost communication with my lovely Tokina macro lens, and ordered me to clean the lens contacts. So I did. It didn’t help. I’m going to tinker with some other lenses and see if the problem is in my favorite lens (oh no, I would cry) or the camera body (more crying — there is no good diagnosis here). Maybe this is a sign that it’s time to upgrade to a full frame camera, like the Canon 5D mk IV? No it is not, because I looked at the price and went into shock.

It was also bad because the spiders were hungry and happy with their new clean quarters and I had so many opportunities for good, dynamic action shots, but no go.

OK, I’m just going to go grade papers for a bit, as a kind of gravy for sorrow.

A jailbird and spouse abuser claims to have debated me — you’d think I’d have noticed

Shock. Horror. Gasp. Kent Hovind tells a lie about me.

By the way, I agree that I look pretty shabby today. I dyed my beard a month ago, and of course it’s coming in gray again, and I don’t feel like dying it again. I’m also shellacked by the booster shot I got on Thursday…getting better, but still horribly achey. I’ve also been wearing a stupid boot to recover from tendinitis, and yeah, I’m tired. You are allowed to call me old and ugly. But at least I’m not a lying moron like Kent.

Texas is polluting the educational system again

This seems to be a never-ending pattern. Texas has a huge collection of schools, and in their usual stupid wisdom, has put a small group of professional assholes in charge of dictating what textbooks they use, and then, because capitalism, all the textbook publishers fall in line and the rest of the country is afflicted with their choices. The Texas Freedom Network tries to oppose the State Board of Education (SBOE), but Texas don’t care. Here’s the latest dollop of poison the SBOE delivers.

This week’s Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) hearing proves once again that the board is where textbooks go to be censored.

In an astonishing series of votes, the SBOE rejected all but one publisher’s health textbooks for our public schools. The reason? Board members caved to critics who attacked the textbooks because they included topics related to sex education or because they acknowledged the existence of LGBTQ people.

The one publisher to gain approval was able to do so only after making significant changes at the behest of the board.

It is a sad day for Texas students who deserve the best information with which to make healthy decisions. It is also a sad day for the LGBTQ young people who are in our schools and the board continues to exclude.

This is a repeat of past instances of the board censoring textbooks. And it is a troubling sign of what is to come in 2022 when the SBOE revises social studies curriculum standards, a process that takes place not long after Gov. Abbott signed a law designed to limit discussions about the true history of racism and inequality in this country.

Fuck Texas. No, really, it’s a drag on the rest of the country. Sorry if you live in Texas, but could you get a little more loud and tear down this terrible system? I can tolerate you using your educational budgets to build nothing but football stadiums, but this is where you’re hurting everyone else, not just yourselves.

Do you think UATX will just fade away?

That absurd “University” of Austin fakeout has been met with satire and ridicule to the point where its board of advisors is crumbling, with members realizing that they really don’t want to be tied to this boat anchor. I suspect the investors behind it aren’t too upset by it, since they have so much money it’s dribbling out of their ears and are probably fine with shifting from “saving Western civilization” to “tax write-off” — it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile, those advisors are adroitly pivoting to a different approach.

Check out FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. It’s got the kind of explicit, praiseworthy title, while being nothing but an anti-woke assortment of prominent defenders, that it was probably named by a Republican, who are masters of lying about their motives. It certainly has a commendable mission.

Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.

Today, almost 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education ushered in the Civil Rights Movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles. To insist on our common humanity. To demand that we are each entitled to equality under the law. To bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.

Wow. Martin Luther King Jr cast such a huge shadow that all kinds of vermin try to hide beneath it. It’s depressing how that ringing phrase about being “judged by the content of our character” has been adopted by the right wing as the one part of his ethos that they will accept. The first paragraph gives it all away, though. The threat of laws that say you can’t discriminate against people for their skin color, gender and sexual orientation is twisted by these assholes into a claim that we will be REQUIRED to identify ourselves by skin color, gender and sexual orientation, as if that weren’t often already obvious. How dare you notice that I am a white male cis-gender heterosexual? If you recognize that, doesn’t that mean that tomorrow you’re going to discriminate against me? After all, that’s what I’d do.

This is a demand to ignore all sexual and racial characteristics, to bury our differences in a graveyard laid out by the current lords of the status quo, rather than to celebrate them. It will work to successfully recruit the people who are so damn tired of being oppressed that they like the idea of joining the oppressors. It will definitely appeal to the dominant recipients of a system of injustice, because it’s saying that nothing needs to change.

You’re thinking I sound kind of cynical, aren’t you? We liberal lefties want to end discrimination on the basis of skin color and sex, don’t we, so why judge this organization that says the same thing? Greg Laden pointed out that their board of advisors is a rogue’s gallery of the usual suspects. It is commendably diverse, but nestled comfortably in their midst is an assortment of the standard out-and-proud white supremacists. And some of them have just flitted over from the UATX board of advisors.

Oh, look. Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Douglas Murray. Let’s bring in some IDW-adjacent racists for this supposedly anti-racist organization. They’ll need a new gig after UATX folds.

Megyn Kelly? Oh yeah, she’ll bring the shiny luster and glamor of Fox News. (She’s listed as a “journalist”, by the way — oh, how that noble occupation has been degraded.)

Of course Steven Pinker is there. If the organization has a transparent lefty facade but is actually intensely regressive, that’s the slime he loves to writhe around in.

If you want to end gender and sexual orientation discrimination, well, you’ve got to have Abigail Schrier on board. Transphobes welcome! Trans men and women, not so much.

They don’t want to discriminate against racists, libertarians, and white supremacists, so you can signal your open-mindedness about that by recruiting one person: Michael Shermer.

I don’t know most of the names on that list, and maybe the majority have high-minded goals. But I’m sorry, if you tolerate rubbing elbows with those awful people, you’ve already betrayed your cause. There are cuckoos in the nest. I’d find your goals more honest and believable if you were rooting them out, rather than making them comfortable.

Karen has strong feelings about A Christmas Carol

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis put on a performance of the classic Dickens story. I would have been a bit peevish that it was put on before Thanksgiving, but that’s not what set Karen off. No, it was the introduction.

The incident last Friday began shortly after Haj, who directed “Carol,” gave a curtain speech welcoming everyone back to their “theater home.” Then the lights went down on the 47th edition of the Guthrie’s “Carol.” It was perhaps the most diverse production of the holiday classic to date, with a script by a Hindu playwright, staging by a Palestinian American director and a design team whose multicultural backgrounds matched that of the cast.

Then, the screeching began.

It’s kind of hard to understand, but she’s screaming about it being a British play, and at one point I hear her complaining about it being “Shakespearean”, but here’s a summary of her tirade.

The Guthrie also addressed the content of the woman’s vitriol, which delayed “Carol” for 30 minutes and caused some people to leave the theater. The woman objected to a Palestinian director staging “Carol,” which she termed “a Christian play.” She also spewed anti-Black venom, removed her mask and spit on patrons.
…
“She started mumbling right away that this is a Muslim adaptation of a Christian play,” he said. “Soon she started to berate two women taking a selfie. Then she was telling people to go back to the country they came from and calling a Black man a Black [expletive]. She was out for violence.”

The woman had removed her mask, which the theater requires all patrons to wear. When Caldeira asked her to put it back on, he said she was enraged.

“She started coughing and spitting all over me and my friend,” Caldeira said. “It was scary and frightening. I think the Guthrie has to do more to show what their real values are.”

What a nasty little snowflake. Now I feel like I should go check out the play and support the performance.

After Thanksgiving.

Debooted!

Good news: I had a check up at the doctor today, and she said I don’t have to wear the mega-clunky boot anymore! Instead, I’m downgraded to a brace.

It’s progress. Now I just have to wear this clumsy thing for a month, and as long as there is no relapse, I’ll be free before Christmas.

Curse you, Reginald C. Punnett

Yesterday, I gave my first year students a teeny-tiny quiz over the current unit in basic genetics. No biggie, I’d been hearing some troubling concerns from the class tutor that some of the students were struggling, so this was more of an assessment of how well they were grasping the simplest concepts in Mendelian genetics. Here, I’ll even let you see the entirety of the quiz: 5 questions, 2 points each.

You have a true-breeding diploid organism with the phenotype AB, and a second true-breeding organism with the phenotype ab. A is dominant to a, and B is dominant to b.

  1. What are the genotypes of these two creatures?
  2. You cross these two and obtain a clutch of F1s. What are their genotypes and phenotypes?
  3. You cross two of the F1s with each other. Predict what the phenotypes and their proportions in the next generation should be, assuming that Mendel’s laws apply.
  4. You cross one of the F1s with another organism that has the phenotype ab. Predict what the phenotypes and their proportions in the next generation should be, assuming that Mendel’s laws apply.
  5. You actually do the experiment in #4, you get the following results:
    AB: 35%
    Ab: 15%
    aB: 15%
    ab: 35%
    Interpret this distribution.

See? If you were a student who’d just suffered through 3 weeks of an introduction to genetics, you’d probably have absolutely no problem with this. If you’ve been teaching genetics for a few decades, you could answer this quiz in seconds, in your sleep, while standing on your head. I think that might be part of the problem, because this is stuff I can totally take for granted.

I gave the students 20 minutes. Most of them used the entirety of that time. I scored the quiz that afternoon, and was aghast: mean score was 2.7/10, high score was 8. Yikes. How…? Where have I gone wrong? These are smart, hard-working students, and they missed everything. Then I saw the problem. The quizzes were covered with…

PUNNETT SQUARES. Jesus. They tried to solve every problem with a 4×4 Punnett square, which is insane. Punnett squares are a tool for graphically illustrating the outcome of a cross. They are not tools for calculating the results. They are a terrible, slow, clumsy tool for doing that. The textbook is full of ’em, I think because they’re easy to draw and give the illusion of a comprehensive answer. I’d shown a few in class, because I had to explain what the textbook was showing them, but I always told them that Punnett squares were terrible and useless, but this is what they knew, probably from high school, and then reinforced by the text, and then I made the mistake of trying to explain what the book figures were showing, and they came away with the impression that this is what geneticists do. It is not. Mendelian genetics are dead simple. You can just treat each locus independently (and they’re trivial, you can memorize all the possible results if you can hold 3 frequencies in your head), solve for A, solve for B, multiply to get the answer for A & B.

Christ, they’re trying to mechanically brute-force a solution with 4×4 Punnett squares, and it’s a disaster.

I can’t blame the students, though, it’s all on me. I remember being their age and taking Dr Sandler’s genetics course at the UW, and struggling for the first few weeks, until suddenly the light bulb flicked on in my head and I saw how easy Mendel was, and then when he started layering on the advanced stuff, like segregation distorters and epistatic interactions (seriously, try solving those kinds of problems with a Punnett square — you might be able to assemble some kind of nightmarish diagram, but it’s not efficient. You can’t even do linkage with a Punnett square.), it was all just an easy arithmetic modifier added on to the basic concept. But then, Sandler was a brilliant teacher, I’ve got some catching up to do.

So how to deal with this problem…next week, I’m going to rewind and go back to the basics, review these elementary problems without Punnett squares anywhere in sight, and actively tell the students that Reginald C. Punnett was of the devil, put on this Earth to confound generations of genetics students. Then, over Christmas break, I’m going to back over my stored presentations and notes and edit out every mention of the P word. Maybe I should print one out so I can put it on the floor the first day of class and piss all over it — nah, some administrator would probably complain.

Then, you out there — yeah, YOU, high school teachers and textbook publishers — stop poisoning students minds with these abominations. I’ve never liked them, but I keep using them because they are traditional, and because the books and students come with them preloaded. Just stop it. They’re pedagogically bad. I’ve got to explicitly unteach them now.

This is a tragic setback, because what my plan for the course was saying is that I start next week on the developmental biology unit, my favorite stuff, and now it’s getting bounced back two weeks, and is going to get slammed up against the end of the term. I’m going to blame Punnett.