My black widows were relocated to new empty cages, and overnight they filled them with beautiful, intricate cobwebs, like this one.
It looks chaotic, but I can trace a couple of gumfoot lines in there that have bracing to allow them to hoist up any prey that stumbles into them.
You may not be interested, but I passed my physical exam. Blood pressure is perfect, cholesterol levels are so low the doctor has cut my statin dosage in half, I’ve apparently got the healthy body of a 67 year old.
I even got a perfect score on the cognitive test, which means I’m at least as smart as Donald Trump. My annual performance review is coming up this month, I’m planning to tell the university that my doctor said I was cognitively flawless, so gimme a raise. At the very least, I’m going to brag to everyone that I remembered “apple, penny, table” for a whole couple of minutes. Like I’m doing right here.
I also got a couple of vaccines, one for tetanus, another for pneumonia. My immune system is now mighty.
Jon Stewart channels my personal feelings about the Democrats in general and Chuck Schumer in particular. We are so thoroughly screwed by these blithering cowards.
Look, now my blood pressure is elevated just before I go in for my physical. I’m going to tell the doctor it’s not my fault, it’s the Democrats.
Today is the day for my annual physical exam, and I’m about to get my veins tapped and my body poked and get informed about my bad habits and told about my imminent doom. It’s going to take a while. Then I have to rush back for multiple appointments with students and to teach a couple of classes.
So today is filmstrip day! Is anyone else old enough to remember when the teacher was hung over and just wheeled in the machine that would show a series of still images with voiceover so they could retreat into a back corner and close their eyes for a while?
That might be the same people who remember who Al Gore was.
We were hit by a snowstorm this past weekend, but it’s now melting away fast. We can’t get too excited yet, because apparently another storm is supposed to brush by us this week.
We’ve had a few flowering plants that brave the whole winter, and this what they look like right now.
Here’s what they looked like last summer.
Maybe when they stop looking so skeletal and dead, the spiders will come back.
I’ve spent my entire career training students in STEM, and sending them off to graduate and professional schools to become scientists and doctors and dentists and veterinarians and nurses and research technicians. That may be ending sooner than I expected. Entire fields are drying up right now.
Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.
“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon, because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.
Spring is when we’re accustomed to hearing joyful news from our students who have applied to and gotten in to the programs they wanted. It’s kind of quiet around the campus this year. A lot of students who have been working hard for four years are being told that their progression is over, and are having to rethink their life suddenly.
I’m worried, too. Universities around the country have suffered declining enrollments, and it’s going to make it worse if the perception spreads that universities are a dead end. Government policy is about to kill science and engineering in this country. It’s also a bit ironic that these people who have been railing about DEI and liberal arts and majors that don’t have concrete utility are now using that angle to destroy STEM education.
We might wonder who is going to benefit from this intellectual suicide.
At the University of Nebraska, an institute that works to improve water management for agriculture offered to host a doctoral candidate in hydrology from Ghana and was talking to three other international students. But it had to rescind the offer after it lost USAID funding, said Nicole Lefore, associate director of the school’s Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.
She now worries about the diplomatic fallout, noting she has met with agriculture ministers in other countries who were educated at land grant universities in the U.S. through USAID programs.
“The university you go to, people have a loyalty to it. And so bringing in generations of students for education and agriculture in the U.S. helped to create those personal connections and then later scientific and diplomatic connections. That’s really important to the soft diplomacy side of what the innovation labs were doing.”
She said she is barraged with emails asking what this will mean.
“The only winner out of this is China, she said. ”Because the countries that are being cut off there, I think they will turn to someone.”
I thought MAGA hated China, but here they go helping that country, and the EU. I’ve got one bright student who is thinking about applying to a university in Mexico. Everyone benefits except the US.
You know, categories are arbitrary, subjective, and human constructed, right? This is an excellent illustration of the idea.
I appreciate that each example includes a tidy, neat rationalization, so we can see that the rationalizations are arbitrary, too. I just wish he’d do the same thing for categories of DNA sequences so I’d have an excuse to use it in my classes.
As seen on Discord: Lockheed Martin Develops Giant Tactical Rubber Spider.
Although…I notice they don’t include a price tag. Lockheed Martin wouldn’t gouge their customers with grossly inflated prices, would they?
Yesterday, I left my coat at home and went for a brisk walk downtown, which left me sweating. It felt like a nice warm spring.
Tomorrow, all the students will be returning from spring break, all tanned and rested and ready to work.
So what happens today? I was awakened to the sound of sleet and wind rattling the windows, and went to look out and see what’s going on. This is what I saw.
The windows are all glazed with ice. There is a nice foundation layer of ice on the ground, with snow coming down on top of that, wind blowing it everywhere. We’ve got weather warnings about whiteout conditions.
Drive safe, students! I guess I’ll have to prepare my planned lecture so I can deliver it over zoom. It’s not as if I’m going anywhere today, I’m just going to hunker down and work from home anyway.
Bryan Johnson — you know, the Bryan Johnson who wants to achieve eternal youth by turning himself into a plasticine android — has taken the next inevitable step. It’s not a bold new medical innovation. It’s turning his lifestyle and his weird recipes and behavior into commodities that he can sell to gullible people, especially now that RFK jr has conveniently tagged all the dupes with the MAHA label. Johnson set up a conference that you can attend for the low, low price of $249 ($1799 for the premium package), and he and his associates will lecture you on how to don’t die
by buying a subscription to his $15-$20 per plate food delivery service. You could live forever on this kind of meal:
I knew this was going to happen. Bizarre schemes by Trump-lovin’ rich people are a natural consequence of the world we live in now. Maya Vinokour attended the first event in New York, and blesses us with a lengthy breakdown of all the nonsense and banality that went down. Really, it’s long — but all you need is the conclusion.
I overhear a young woman telling her friends, her voice hesitant: “I guess this was ever so slightly overpriced?”—laughable from my perspective, as a severe understatement. Even at the Premium tier, the summit’s health “insights” were either overly familiar or extravagant and outlandish. The most daring proposal I heard all day was that we can save our messy human selves from technological obsolescence by capitulating to algorithms in advance. Is that a good idea? In keeping with this authoritarian moment in American history, what Johnson’s Blueprint and its commercial ecosystem does, ultimately, is invite us to understand our own dehumanization as a form of empowerment.
If that has whet your appetite, Bryan Johnson is taking his medicine show on the road, and is going to be bringing it to Los Angeles, New York, and Miami. Get your tickets now.
I’ve done multi-city traveling lecture tours on the past, and they’re grueling, even when all I did was talk for an hour and then go to a restaurant and spend a night in another hotel room. They’re bad for your health. Somebody should tell Johnson that he’s going to reduce his lifespan by doing this.
