I need an economist to explain this to me

Or maybe a psychologist. OK, I sorta understand the wacky mindset of those people who obsess over gold — they want the heavy shiny stuff, because it seems more solid and real than the abstraction of numbers in a bank account, and if you are a bit paranoid, you might want that apparent reliabilty of an expensive metal under your mattress. It’s the kind of thing that gets advertised on talk radio, with an audience of terrified old people (and your goal is to terrify them even more), so Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck rely on that gold advertising money.

But this mystifies me. Why would these same people then turn around and trust…a credit card? The latest iterations of stupid conservative talk radio, like Dave Rubin, are now promoting something called the Glint card, which is a credit card which claims to be based on gold.

I don’t understand the psychology here. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t trust bank accounts, where your money can be whisked away with a flicker of bits in a computer, why would you then turn your precioussss into another abstraction?

Dreading how this could end

It feels like it’s going to drag on forever.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, the official GOP Twitter account is blasting out the idea that good Republicans will die fighting to overthrow the rule of law in their state.

Fine. Die, then. Hold your breath until you turn purple. Kick and scream on the floor. Having a tantrum won’t change the fact that Biden won. I’m also kind of pissed off that it’s Biden, rather than a real progressive Democrat, but I’m prepared to work through the process.

By the way, we’ve run into this @Ali character the Arizona Republican Party is re-tweeting. The last time I heard of him was when he and Jacob Wohl toured downtown Minneapolis trying to smear Ilhan Omar, unsuccessfully, and made a false report of a crime. He has a history that wobbles around silly and ugly.

After one of the first 2020 primary debates, Alexander went viral claiming that Kamala Harris wasn’t an “American Black,” because she was of Jamaican and Indian heritage, instead of descending from African-Americans who had been forced into Antebellum-era slavery. Alexander was convicted of two felonies in 2007 and 2008, and has a track record of publicly noting people who are Jewish. He made a sensationalist video with right-wing snafu generator Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, the Islamaphobic failed Congressional candidate, wherein Wohl seemingly fakes the group receiving death threats during filming.

If you aren’t willing to die, at least continue to entangle yourself with the Rabid Right.

Progress!

This is a huge grading day — final grades are due on Wednesday. But I took a brief break this afternoon to take a few pictures on this frosty foggy day.

This is my favorite photo, though.

That’s a screenshot of the piece of the Canvas window for my cell biology class: usually, that big white space lists all the assignments awaiting grading. They’re done! Nothing left to grade! It hasn’t been that clear since mid-September!

Cell bio is done, two more classes to go (they were much smaller than cell, though, so they won’t take as much time.)

Back of the line, MAGAts!

After months of dragging their heels and opposing pandemic control efforts, our Republican representatives are making a rush for the front of the vaccination line.

Republican leaders of the Minnesota Legislature suggested Friday that state lawmakers and the staff who work for them should be among the early recipients of a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.

“I’m encouraging the vaccines, as one of the priority groups after elderly and some of our front-line workers, that we think about the people that have to be essential at the Capitol,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said at a forum with other legislative leaders.

No. If Republicans all got sick and had to stay home for a month, ending their obstructionism, we’d make better progress. All Republicans should be sent to the end of the queue.

Front of the line: health care workers. Right behind them: public school teachers. Then, if there were any justice in the world, we’d do a rational risk assessment and distribute the vaccine to those communities with the highest mortality from the disease, which would be the black and Latin communities in our cities.

Aww, but get real. This is America. It’s going to go first to the already wealthy people, because it’s going to be sold on capitalist principles, which means the actual beneficiaries will be those with the least need.

Alien Worlds

Netflix has this new series, Alien Worlds, that I sort of half-watched yesterday. It was nice brain candy to munch on while I was more focused on grading, but nah, sorry, not a lot of substance to it.

It’s only 5 episodes long, and each one is built around a different imaginary planet with somewhat different parameters, with different challenges for the life that evolved there. Within each episode, there’s a fraction that uses CGI to model the imaginary creatures of the imaginary world — and the CGI isn’t bad, we’ve come a long way from the clumsy models of old Discovery Channel “Walking with…” shows — and there’s a larger fraction dedicated to describing the earthly research that inspired it.

The problem is that the real world stuff, with interviews with real scientists, was far more compelling than the CGI gimmicks. The “Janus” episode, for instance, is supposed to be about a tidally-locked planet with huge extremes in the environment, but it’s really much more about terrestrial arthropods, with researchers explaining their work in interesting environments with complex organisms. Their imaginary pentapods were sterile and cartoonish — it was a world with a nearly negligible amount of species diversity, just their one cartoon alien scampering about, plucking out 1-dimensional prey creatures on rather barren landscapes. Every time they were on screen, I was grumbling “Get back to the leaf-cutter ants”.

That’s how I felt about every episode. The central gimmick of imaginative CGI aliens was less impressive than the real biology being done on Planet Earth, and was just a distraction. Human imagination is just not as good as evolutionary reality.

One big plus about the show: they were working with actual researchers in various places around the world, and that meant they escaped from the usual trap of one narrator (usually a white person who isn’t involved in the science) providing third person descriptions of what’s happening. Instead, we get lots of diverse people, women and brown people with accents, describing in first person what they find exciting about their work. The researchers have a lot of enthusiasm and joy about the biology.

One big negative: skip the last episode, it’s terrible. I knew it was going to suck when they opened with the “alien autopsy” footage. They then move on to an imaginary planet populated with brains in vats faced with the death of their star…and they lack any earthly analog, so instead of cutting back and forth between CGI and enthusiastic scientists doing real research, it’s switching between animated robots tending blobs floating in tanks (boring!) to human SETI researchers (even more boring!).

I’m not looking forward to a continuation of the series. It’s nice background noise, but if I were to make any recommendations to the producers, it would be to ditch the whole CGI/aliens nonsense, but that’s probably the premise that got them a Netflix deal.