The last Andy Weir movie I will ever waste money on

The commenters here are persuasive. I dissed Andy Weir and his new movie, and I was told that it was entertaining and I should give it a chance. So I did. I went to the theater to see Project Hail Mary.

I loathed it.

Sorry.

The premise is garbage. Weir postulates an “astrophage,” a bacterium that harvests carbon from Venus and then streams to the sun, “eating” the sun, collecting vast amounts of energy, dimming the sun, and threatening humanity with extinction within decades. They send a probe to the line flowing between Venus and the Sun and collect the mysterious black particles, bring it back to Earth, and a middle school science teacher looks in a microscope and figures out that it’s an organism that harvests energy from stars.

Stop right there. I’d appreciate it if someone could justify that plot hook, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1950s hack disaster movie. It’s stupid.

Then astronomers notice that all the local stars are experiencing this same mysterious dimming. The “astrophage” must be infectious! Let’s not concern ourselves with the timing: we observe a rapid phenomenon occurring within the lifespan of a single human being simultaneously in a population of stars scattered over a volume 100 light years across. There’s a complete lack of awareness of space and time in this movie.

Humanity’s response is to quickly build a spaceship to fly to the one star, Tau Ceti, that isn’t exhibiting the mysterious dimming to see if they can find a “cure”. Fortunately, the “astrophages” also store such a tremendous amount of energy that they can form a fantastic, near-magical rocket fuel, enabling the construction of a starship that can travel at something near light-speed. This is the kind of exotic nonsensical space fuel you’d find in a 1930s pulp novel.

The plan is to send a small crew with one engineer, one pilot, and one scientist to a star 12 light years away, to collect information about how Tau Ceti was resisting the infection, and then return to Earth with a solution. That’s going to take at least 24 years round-trip, to deal with a crisis that’s going to doom Earth in 30 years. My problem was that my mental calendar was getting hopelessly lost by this time.

Then the scientist who is expected to lead this critical mission to stop human extinction was the middle school science teacher. This teacher is the charming, charismatic, appealing Ryan Gosling. We’re doomed if that is our selection criterion.

The ship takes off. Next thing we know, Ryan Gosling wakes up from an induced coma (that’s how humans can survive a 12 light-year trip?), the two other crew members have died — no explanation provided, but nice to know pilots and engineers are superfluous — and Gosling has amnesia.

That’s just the setup for the main part of the story, and it’s such radically nonsensical and unscientific garbage that I felt like walking out, and only stayed in my seat by virtue of Ryan Gosling’s charm and the curiosity and need to find out how the story would crawl out of this mass of sewage.

No spoilers. You’ll have to suffer as I did if you want the answers.

Short answer: Gosling finds a cute chatty alien who is there for the same purpose, and they team up. Don’t worry, there’s none of that complicated first-contact rigamarole to establish communication — they just point at things and say words and use a computer to compile a dictionary. Quickly. Mostly off-screen. Can’t let the whole alien complication that Weir has introduced get in the way of the whole star-eating space bacteria problem that Weir introduced!

Gosling also has a Weir staple: a white board that he can scribble on to solve science problems. For example, Gosling discovers a problem that will make the alien’s spaceship break down on the way to its home in 40 Eridani. So he scribbles some stuff on the white board and decides to fly off to the rescue, and somehow find this stranded spaceship somewhere between Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani. Are you surprised to learn that he does? Spaceships are easy! All you need for interstellar navigation is a white board and a collection of colored markers, and a pilot with no training who was hired on the basis of his entertaining middle-school science classes.

Ryan Gosling is a good actor who gave a great performance in an unbelievable role, and the alien (named Rocky) was amusing and somewhat original, but you will never, ever, ever, ever convince me to see another movie based on an Andy Weir book. He’s a hack.

Jesus christ, that movie was fucking stupid.

How to respond to a death

Robert Mueller has died. It’s not that I have strong feelings about this guy, but I was pleased to see that Donald Trump did have strong feelings.

Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Remember this! When the old orange dotard finally dies, he has nicely set an example of the appropriate response. “Donald J. Trump just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” It’s perfect!

Noah, or Snow White?

I have a lot of different genetics texts, and I sometimes browse through them to get different perspectives, or in this case to get ideas for exam questions. I was skimming through Cummings’ Human Heredity: Principles and Issues when I ran into this surprising text box.

The biblical character Noah, along with the Ark and its animals, is among the most recognizable figures in the Book of Genesis. His birth is recorded in a single sentence, and although the story of how the Ark was built and survived a great flood is told later, there is no mention of Noah’s physical appearance. But other sources contain references to Noah that are consistent with the idea that Noah was one of the first albinos mentioned in recorded history.
The birth of Noah is recorded in several sources, including the Book of Enoch the Prophet, written about 200 B.c. This book, quoted several times in the New Testament, was regarded as lost until 1773, when an Ethiopian version of the text was discovered. In describing the birth of Noah, the text relates that his “flesh was white as snow, and red as a rose; the hair of whose head was white like wool, and long, and whose eyes were beautiful.” A reconstructed fragment of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes Noah as an abnormal child born to normal parents. This fragment of the scroll also provides some insight into the pedigree of Noah’s family, as does the Book of Jubilees. According to these sources, Noah’s father (Lamech) and his mother (Betenos) were first cousins. Lamech was the son of Methuselah, and Lamech’s wife was a daughter of Methuselah’s sister. This is important because marriage between close relatives sometimes is involved in pedigrees of autosomal recessive traits, such as albinism.
If this interpretation of ancient texts is correct, Noah’s albinism is the result of a consanguineous marriage, and not only is he one of the earliest albinos on record but his grandfather Methuselah and Methuselah’s sister are the first recorded heterozygous carriers of a recessive genetic trait.

I fail to see what this would add to a student’s understanding of genetics: OK, lot of inbreeding among the Biblical patriarchs, I was entertained by the description of Noah that sounds more like Snow White, I guess Michael Cummings is revealed to have an interest in obscure Biblical text reconstruction, and it might appeal to theologically inclined students, but yeesh, I expect my students to have a better appreciation of the quality of the data.

I don’t think you can claim that Noah was an inbred albino on the basis of such slim evidence. This is a figure who is pretty well swaddled up in myth and legend, who is claimed to have lived through a global flood that didn’t happen, who lived, supposedly, to the age of 950, and who is claimed to have lived around 3000BCE, when your evidence is based on a text fragment from 200BCE. And now we’re going to deduce a detail of his genetics? No, thank you.

Fascinating things I learned today

We get helium as a byproduct of liquified natural gas processing. So it’s a nice side effect of our dependence on oil.

I did not know that.

Helium is heavily used by the semiconductor industry. Making all those fancy high end chips requires helium in the process.

I had no idea.

30% of the world’s helium supply is extracted in Qatar, which ships it the semiconductor manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

There are all kinds of surprises in the global supply chain.

The ships that transport that crucial element are currently bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz.

I can see where this is going.

Iran just blew up one of Qatar’s helium plants.

Uh-oh.

All this destruction was triggered by a rogue American president, who is also a raging asshole and incompetent moron.

At least I already knew that!

I hope no one was hoping to get a new computer (or an MRI) in the future.

Oh, and hey, if you’ve got a birthday coming up, maybe ixnay on the artypay alloonsbay. They just seem wasteful.

What’s with all the pedos nowadays?

They’ve been here all the time, but somehow were allowed to continue to assault children. I don’t get it. This ought to be one of the greatest taboos in our society. We regard abusers of children as the lowest of the low, when they are caught, but when they’re running free our institutions seem to actively protect them.

The latest story is that another Duggar man has been caught. Joseph Duggar, one of the swarm of children exploited by The “Learning” Channel TLC in their show “19 Kids and Counting” has been arrested.

Former reality TV star Joseph Duggar is facing a child molestation charge in Florida, almost five years after his brother Josh, who also starred in the TLC show “19 Kids and Counting,” was convicted of downloading child sexual abuse images.

Joseph Duggar, 31, was arrested in Arkansas, where he lives, and was awaiting extradition to Florida on Thursday. Duggar is charged with lewd and lascivious behavior on a child under 12 years old, according to an arrest affidavit from the Bay County Sheriff’s Office in Panama City, Florida.

Police officers in Tontitown, Arkansas, on Wednesday contacted deputies in Bay County, saying they had interviewed a 14-year-old girl who told them that Duggar had molested her several times during a family trip to Panama City Beach when she was age 9, according to the affidavit.

Remember that that show was cancelled in 2015 when Joseph’s brother Josh had abused his sisters and a babysitter. He’s in prison for that right now. I guess raping children was a family tradition. He’s from a Baptist family whose only claim to fame was a self-righteous belief that they should have more children than they could care for, and were further entitled by a terrible television network that thought it was entertaining to pump up their privilege by pretending they were role models. Maybe the parents and a few network executives should also be spending some time in a jail cell.

But if you thought the Duggar family saga was appalling enough, get a load of this. The Epstein files have been redacted and censored and hidden away under the shelter of an evil witch, Pam Bondi, who really doesn’t want the truth about her boss, Donald Trump, revealed. But there’s a way around that: congress people have been able to read the uncensored version, and here Representative Dan Goldman reads aloud one of the passages that the Republicans don’t want you to hear.

Trump tried to compel a 13-15 year old girl to perform oral sex on him, she was disgusted and bit him, so he struck her and called her a “bitch”. I am further disgusted by him.

Put Deviant Donald in a prison right next to Josh and Joseph Duggar. That’s one way to prevent him from bombing other countries to distract from his molesting of children.

But somehow we’ve got to fix this problem of rapacious older men attacking children — I don’t have an answer because I can’t even comprehend wanting to do such things.

Kudos to my 2026 Genetics students!

They have just completed the first half-semester experiment, a complementation test with two loci in flies, and we sat down in lab and did an analysis of the data. Perfect execution! We got the expected result (the genes complemented each other) and all of the students are now officially masters of basic fly breeding.

Then, just because the F1s from that cross were all heterozygotes at two loci, we went ahead and did another cross with them, your classic dihybrid cross, which should result in 4 phenotypes with a ratio of 9:3:3:1, according to that old guy Mendel. It did! It’s always thrilling to do these simple experiments that we all take for granted and see that, by god, Mendelian genetics actually does work under these specific conditions, and even a gang of undergraduates who’d never looked at Drosophila before can do it.

We’ve got another experiment in progress, a mapping cross that we started before spring break — we have to overlap experiments a little bit so we can get them all done in a single semester. I’m impressed with this bunch, though. They’ve got the potential to be fabulous geneticists. So hire them after they graduate!

(I don’t actually expect most of them to want to go on to careers in genetics, but they could. They have the potential.)

Anyone remember the Metaverse?

No? The huge investment Facebook made in launching a virtual reality social media platform that Mark Zuckerberg predicted would take over the internet? It was so important that Zuck renamed his whole company to Meta! How could you forget?

Well, now it’s safe to purge your memory banks. The Metaverse is dead or dying.

Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021 and never found its footing. The platform never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users, which isn’t enough for a project that consumed billions of dollars. Reality Labs, the Meta division responsible for VR and metaverse development, has accumulated nearly $80 billion in losses since 2020. In the fourth quarter alone it posted an operating loss of more than $6 billion.

The costs were always the argument for staying the course. Zuckerberg had promised the metaverse would reach a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in commerce. Pulling back meant admitting those projections were wrong.

I am impressed that Zuckerberg can throw away $80 billion on a bad gamble on a whim. Surely this means the stockholders will rise up and depose their incompetent leader…nah, no, you know that once you’re rich enough you are free from consequences.

You might hope that they’d learn something from this, but no — their future is instead going to be built on AI.

What changed the calculus was AI. When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, Meta pivoted its public messaging fast. Its AI research division, long led by scientist Yann LeCun, gave the company a credible foundation to build on. Ad revenue improved. The stock recovered. By 2024, Meta had nearly tripled in value from its 2022 lows.

AI seems to have a niche in building stock market confidence and ad revenue, that’s nice. I think it’s going to face some consequences in the near future, as people realize they’ve been sold a shiny bill of goods, and maybe people will learn to tell Zuck to shut the fuck up.

I’m trying to keep it light here

The world, and especially the United States right now, sucks. So I have little rituals to keep me somewhat balanced by, for instance, reading a set of webcomics every morning. Of course, I still have to complain about them, but the intent is there.

The Far Side frequently cheers me up with comics featuring spiders. There’s one today:

Has anyone else noticed a fondness for multi-limbed aliens in recent SF? It only makes sense, since humans are chronically under-supplied with limbs, and the ones we’ve got are over-specialized to specific functions. Or maybe it’s just my taste in SF.

Although…the newest Andy Weir book, Project Hail Mary, is being released as a movie, with a cute 5-armed alien, and I’m not going to watch it. I’ve detested all of Weir’s books since The Martian, which I wanted to throw at the wall and then set on fire. In general, I’ve grown to dislike novels about rescuing all of humanity with some guy in a spaceship, and I especially dislike Weir’s style of episodic cliffhangers resolved with epically unlikely instances of plot armor.

Wait, I’m supposed to cheer myself up with this stuff.

OK, come on xkcd.

Naturally, the first spot I looked at was my home on the map. I’m in the western part of Minnesota, in what is called the prairie pothole region, surrounded by shallow lakes scoured out by glaciers. So that part is kind of right, but incomplete. I’d say the dominant force on the landscape around me is agriculture. We’ve only got tiny patches of native prairie left. The boundary waters farther north are pristine, so far, but the Republicans are scheming to open that up for copper mining. I’m going to have to redo that map and replace most of it with the legend “PEOPLE”.

One last attempt to salvage some optimism. I bought myself a Kobo e-book reader, and another ritual I have is to read something non-political every night before bed. I got this Kobo with a special deal: it came pre-loaded with every book Terry Pratchett ever published. Can’t go wrong there!

I recently finished Men at Arms, which is pure escapist fantasy. It’s got dragons in it. It’s also about a policeman who takes his civic duties as a servant of the people seriously. I know, dragons? I can suspend disbelief for that, but Sam Vimes is stretching credibility. Also, this book is about the importance of diversity, and efforts to widen representation in the city watch, another ridiculous fantasy element.

I’ve just started on Jingo, a very timely choice, since it’s about the vaguely Western medieval city of Ankh-Morpork going to war with the vaguely Middle Eastern empire of Klatch over a small island in the ocean separating them. It’s disturbingly relevant. It was reassuring to see Sam Vines resist militarizing the City Watch (they’re not a military authority, he says, they’re fellow citizens), but Pratchett better salvage some hope from this situation. I need it.