Minnesota is doing things right

I’m a little surprised: Minnesota is the best state for coronavirus testing. There are good reasons for that.

Minnesota isn’t the biggest state or the wealthiest. But it has a progressive governor, a budget surplus that’s allowed it to supplement federal funding and spend about $150 million on testing so far, and a well-functioning pandemic task force. It’s home to the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, one of the nation’s best public research institutions. All those advantages may explain why it’s one of the few states to implement a testing strategy that the federal government should have adopted, one that helped Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan avoid the worst of the pandemic’s ruin, and that doesn’t require dramatic scientific advances or carry any potential health risks. “I love what Minnesota is doing,” says Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “We need a lot more of that.”

One of the points the article makes is that this is also a long term investment opportunity. The state made a deal with a biotech company to put together a testing center, which is going to be a part of a biotech hub with the equipment and trained employees left behind after the pandemic is over. This is something I wish more people would recognize: building an infrastructure to deal with the current crisis gives you the tools to fight other problems. This is true of global climate change — building alternative energy sources isn’t just an expense right now, it’s an opportunity for the future.

The state leased the space for the lab and paid for the equipment—$4.7 million in total. Infinity BiologiX set it up in eight weeks. When the day comes that Minnesota no longer needs it, Infinity BiologiX will keep the equipment—the Chemagic 360 machines named Shelly, Randy, Timmy, and Jimmy, after characters from South Park; and the QuantStudio 5s named Morticia and Gomez, after The Addams Family. In the meantime, Minnesota receives discounted prices on the tests themselves and a promise from the companies to process as many as 30,000 a day and make results available within 48 hours after the samples arrive at the lab. Minnesota has set aside at least $30 million for the program. Feldman says Michigan, New Mexico, and Wyoming also want Infinity BiologiX labs, but this winter, with federal funding uncertain, they haven’t had the budget.

One more thing that explains our situation here in Morris — the big testing place here in town is the National Guard Armory, although you can also get tested at the local clinic. I thought it was weird to see the recommendations in the paper to go to the Armory for your medical test. It makes sense, though.

Minnesotans swarmed the 10 community testing sites as soon as they began saliva collection in late October, “tailgating for testing in the parking lot before we opened,” says Vadis. Vault brought in people from Walt Disney Co. with experience in line management. It trained members of the National Guard to oversee the collection process. Many of them are medical practitioners of some sort, says Feldman, though they don’t have to be. It takes about 30 minutes to learn how to supervise the spitting and package the specimen. There’s also cultural training. “We’re teaching the guards to be super approachable, so no one is intimidated,” Feldman says. Minnesota is home to sizable populations of Somalis and Hmong, and finding enough staff who can translate medical terms in their languages has proved challenging.

Also, otherwise my only association with the armory is that’s where the traveling circus is held when they come to town. The Armory has this cavernous huge space (I have no idea what it’s used for at other times) with bleachers where events like that can be held.

Think last week was stressful? Brace yourself for next week

The insurrectionists are back-pedaling frantically. Charlie Kirk is claim now that it was “stupid” and “unwise” to invade the capitol, but not criminal. They didn’t mean it! Another benefit of the collapse of Parler (and it’s sloppy coding) is that their plans in the runup have been exposed, and while I can agree that they are “stupid”, the intent is transparent. A sampling:

Is anyone surprised that Amazon and Apple removed all support for Parler?

What I find ominous, though, is that only a few in that sample mention the 6th of January — most were focused on the 20th, the day of the inauguration. Next week. Will the Washington DC police finally take these threats seriously? Will the bad guys try to sneak in by mingling with the inauguration crowds? Are some of the planning acts of terrorism against random people?

Maybe they just want to make sure that the inauguration is even smaller than Trump’s. Mission accomplished, I suspect: I wouldn’t recommend attending.

I sure won’t. That’s the day after my classes begin!

Have you ever seen a spider’s heart beat?

Now you can! I saw that I can easily visualize the hearts beating in my baby spiders.

It made me think of those Pro-Life Across America billboards that show a picture of a cute baby and declare “My heart began to beat at 18 days!”, as if that was a significant event. So I take it anti-choicers who see this video will forever after be kind to spiders?

What is a wolf, anyway?

Science magazine says The legendary dire wolf may not have been a wolf at all, while the actual article published in Nature says only Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage, and says that grey wolves and dire wolves are not as closely related as previously thought.

Dire wolves are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America1, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Here, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil remains dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization across Canidae, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes. This suggests that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire wolves, while the ancestors of grey wolves, coyotes and dholes evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

OK, then, what is a wolf? If we saw a large canine that hunted in packs nowadays, wouldn’t we call it a wolf, while recognizing that it could be distinguished scientifically as a different species? What does “closely related” even mean?

I looked at the results.

Just to put it into context. if dire wolves and grey wolves diverged less than 6 million years ago, that means their relationship is comparable to that of modern humans and chimpanzees, which diverged about 6 million years ago, too. Meanwhile, the various local house spiders I study diverged 50-100 million years ago. Would we have an article declaring that chimpanzees aren’t apes? I don’t think so.

Dire wolves were wolves. They’re a distinct lineage with an interesting history, but I’m not particularly interested in arguing about whether certain colloquial terms or folk taxonomy are appropriate.

Candace Owens is the right-wing persecution complex on steroids

Candace Owens is suing the “fact checkers” because they keep checking the facts in her videos. How dare they! In the name of free speech, she is therefore suing a couple of news sites to silence them.

Our freedoms are being stripped away. The overlords of Big Tech are determining what Americans can and cannot say, share, like, and post. Support our legal efforts today as we fight back against Facebook’s fact-checkers, confronting those who are suppressing free speech, thought, and expression across our great country.

We have begun pursuing two of Facebook’s fact checkers, Lead Stories & USA Today, for wrongfully “fact checking” posts that I put up earlier this year. Both USA Today & Lead Stories silenced me when I posted a different opinion on Covid – in their minds there is only one opinion: theirs. Censorship of conservatives across the world of social media is rampant and without challenging these alleged “fact checkers” we will all be silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

As a result, we have filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Delaware against Lead Stories LLC, a Colorado company & Gannett Satellite Information Network LLC, d/b/a USA Today for malicious publication of false “fact check” articles, wrongfully leveraging their power as Facebook Third Party Fact-Checking partners for the purpose of redirecting web traffic away from me, abusing Section 230 of the Communications Deceny Act and interfering with the commercial enterprises of Candace Owens LLC. Access the lawsuit HERE.

We will be seeing them in Court in 2021.

She made this announcement on multiple social media outlets. On Instagram, she has 3.1 million followers; on Periscope, the video got 1.2 million views; on Facebook, she has 4.5 million followers; she has 2.6 million followers on Twitter. She uses her social media clout to spread misinformation about the coronavirus and BLM and the election. The announcement video itself is a fancy production shot in a professional studio, with what seems to be multiple camerapersons, slick lighting, and a backdrop with glowing letters spelling out “Candace” — there is clearly a lot of money backing her. Yet she claims she is being silenced, disenfranchised and marginalized.

Meanwhile, over here in the real world, here’s the status of my last YouTube video.

Maybe you couldn’t hear me over the sad trombone playing loudly in the background, but who do I sue? I’m clearly being oppressed.

Also, I’m putting myself in great danger here. Notice that I did not link anywhere to any of Candace Owens multiple sites, and I’m telling you that she is a dishonest fraud, and that her message is string of lies — she’s an anti-vaxxer, a Trump enabler, an anti-democratic propagandist, and a shill for the rich. Next thing you know, she’s going to sue me. You are not allowed to criticize Candace Owens or expose her mendacity!

According to creationists, every science is false

Remember what right-wing Christians mean when they talk about “academic freedom”. They really mean freedom from standards.

Here’s a letter from a Christian who is still indignant that the Institute for Creation Research was denied the right to hand out science degrees over ten years ago.

It is fitting to reflect and contemplate the future ramifications following events of significance. One such event transpired shortly after this author applied for admission to the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School (ICRGS). The school was established in 1981 with a unique purpose in providing graduate-level education in fields of science that are particularly relevant to the study of biblical apologetics. Its former graduates earned Master of Science degrees in Science Education, Astrophysics/ Geophysics, Biology, Geology, and General Science,1 and many are now teaching or participating in Christian ministries in various communities.

As a Christian educator, I felt that formal education from one of the world’s leading creation science ministries would serve me well as an important augmentation to the graduate degrees already earned from secular universities. However, only four days after my application was submitted, the board of directors of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) voted to close the doors of the ICRGS indefinitely, effective 30 June 2010. The board reached this painful decision after a long legal battle with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that ultimately resulted in a ruling against ICR and the end of this important educational institution.

He makes a long defense of the ICR, but somehow cannot say outright that the organization teaches as a conclusion that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old. This is a telling omission: their fundamental assumptions are so ridiculous that they dare not say them aloud, choosing instead to claim failings by real sciences that are not there. He cannot defend the process by which the ICR reaches their conclusions, and therefore tries to take them off the table. We’re going to play word games, instead.

For the ICRGS, the quality of education was never the issue, but rather the creation content within the curriculum. The THECB declared that the ICR Grad School program could not be called “science” because it was based on the creation model rather than evolution. To keep creation science and intelligent design out of the classroom, it is often argued that they do not qualify as science. Often the definitions used for such purposes are arbitrarily established to exclude other worldviews and frequently too stringent, also inadvertently ruling current or historic inquiry as unscientific.

The “creation model” is false. It doesn’t work. It was invented in the last century to paper over a primitive literalist interpretation of the Bible, and it’s so indefensible that the only thing he can do is claim real science is also false, therefore creationism has equal standing.

In the 1981 case of McLean vs Arkansas, the judgment defined the essential characteristics of science as being guided by natural law; explanatory by natural law; testable; tentative; and falsifiable. Anti-creationists have added additional requirements, such as Michael Ruse and Eugenie Scott who stated that science deals only with what is repeatable and can be subjected to testing. By such definitions archaeology does not qualify as science, since it is instead a search for intelligent agents rather than material causes. In a historical context, the hard sciences like physics or chemistry also cannot be reduced to these definitions. Much of the early developments of science were not guided by or explained by existing laws or known natural processes.

Archaeology is repeatable, testable, and makes hypotheses that can be criticized and evaluated. Ask an archaeologist! They have strong principles for evaluating evidence, and have arguments that are resolved by going back into the field and collecting empirical observations. That they recognized that intelligent agents, that is, human beings, are part of the process of historical change is not a criterion for rejecting the discipline as a science. Humans are real. They can be observed. We can see the consequences of their actions. So, studying them can be done scientifically.

My physics and chemistry friends are going to be surprised to learn that what they do doesn’t count as science, but going to church does.

That early science was built on guesswork and assumptions does not mean they were somehow unscientific. Our understanding was hammered out of chaos — people made hypotheses about nature, tested them, and re-evaluated their ideas until they conformed better and allowed better predictions about the natural world. Yes? That’s not a strike against science. It’s also the case that we don’t know exactly how life arose, so we make hypotheses about chemical possibilities, and go into the lab, or collect organisms from obscure places like deep sea vents, and test those ideas. That’s what science is!

These exclusionary definitions are especially problematic when we consider the many areas of science that attempt to explain one-time historical events, such as the big bang, the origin of life or biological processes. None of these hypothetical scenarios were observed, nor are they repeatable, allowing testing in any adequate manner. All attempts to reproduce the conditions that gave birth to the first cell have failed. In reality, such events fall well outside the statistical realm of possibilities and contrary to the known laws of science (2nd law of thermodynamics). Experiments in these areas of historical science are based on philosophically derived faith in unseen and unobservable processes.

He doesn’t understand the concept of repeatability, does he? No, we can’t fire off another Big Bang in the basement of the physics building. But we can study the properties of matter and energy and try to understand how they could have arisen. We can build colliders and see how tiny bits of matter interact. We can also observe consequences — the Big Bang theory didn’t arise out of some guy reading one sentence of a holy book and inflating it into a textbook worth of glurge. Instead, it was derived from seen and observed astronomical processes.

It’s telling that when their beliefs, based entirely on flawed interpretations of an extremely limited and internally contradictory text, are questioned, they choose to lash out and whine petulantly that physics, chemistry, biology, and archaeology aren’t real sciences, anyway. It’s kind of pathetic.

I’ll tell you what the ICR doesn’t qualify as science, and it’s simple. Are you free to question the accuracy of your source material? Do you get to revise your interpretation of the evidence to conform to the observable facts? Or are you required to hold certain tenets of faith?

All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week described in Genesis 1:1–2:3, and confirmed in Exodus 20:8-11. The creation record is factual, historical, and perspicuous; thus, all theories of origins or development that involve evolution in any form are false. All things that now exist are sustained and ordered by God’s providential care. However, a part of the spiritual creation, Satan and his angels, rebelled against God after the creation and are attempting to thwart His divine purposes in creation.

Case closed. Asserting your conclusion in the absence of evidence, and in defiance of any possible evidence, is anti-science.