A mysterious case of data blindness, maybe?

We’re teaching students how to plot data and analyze trends and do statistics in lab this week. Here’s an exercise for you. Does this curve look like it’s flattening? Or declining?

That’s us, the Stevens county frequency of COVID-19 cases. Classes are still ongoing. No changes in our plans. I guess that means the incidence must be stable or getting better?

Muh vaccine!

I really want to see a vaccine appear soon, since it’s our only hope for ending this pandemic in the long run. I’m also realistic and know that it would be really unusual to develop one this quickly. AstraZeneca is testing one, and already the trial is on hold, after bad but unspecified adverse effects appeared in the test population.

This is not surprising, and it’s to be expected that the development will not be smooth and linear. It’s still disappointing.

Next, of course, we don’t even know how effective the vaccine will be. You shouldn’t have been partying yet anyhow.

Let the hatred flow!

I’ve been getting repeated email along the lines of this rant below.

Revolutions and cowardice

PZ, you’re a coward, as are the rest of you deranged acolytes on your site! You trash this country as racist, sexist, classist, ableist, militaristic, capitalist, and call for a revolution to erase the stain of America, but you don’t have the guts to launch the revolution yourself! Terror Groups like FARC, ALN, and Boko Haram, while evil, are also courageous! They’re not cowards; it takes tremendous strength to stand up to the might of the US government, and even more to sacrifice yourself as a suicide bomber to kill American officials. You don’t have an iota of the mental fortitude that they do! And stop pretending you care about oppression. You leftists don’t see people as individuals but as organs in a body, that must work right or the whole thing will collapse! Collectivism is the cause of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and militarism, and you have never once attacked leftist organizations or their atrocities! You are a goddamned hypocrite!

You hear that, fellow leftists? Strap on your suicide vests and get out there and murderize masses of people because this angry right-winger (let’s call him “Phil”) wants you to. Phil sounds perfectly normal. He’s just trying to help the leftist cause by giving us good instruction in how best to achieve our aims, which mainly involves killing ourselves. Gosh, yeah, I was just waiting for Phil to give me the go-ahead.

Phil’s been sending me shotgun blasts of exclamation points for a while, and I mostly ignore them. But this one has a follow-up.

I’m planning on becoming a public commentator, in religion politics and other subjects.
If you defame me or slander me, as you have done Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Nugent, Mehta, Ali, and numerous others who sole crime is to reject your perspectives, I will sue you, asshole! I’d don’t know why these others haven’t done that already! Defamation is dangerous as is slander! Falsely portraying someone as a bigot can get them killed! Pim Fortuyn was murdered by a vegan leftist idiot, because leftist’s like you in his home country falsely claimed that he was threatening the safety, rights and security of Dutch Muslims, and Van Der Graft, the killer believed them! Its only a matter of time before the same thing happens to the people you’ve lied about! I apologize for not mentioning this my first email!

Oh. He’s planning on becoming a public commentator, because America, presumably, needs his cool, thoughtful insight. I don’t really know anything about him except his little missives that he slings at me, so it would be difficult to defame him more than I am by just publishing his words verbatim. Good luck with the public commentator gig if you think your own words libel you, Phil.

I’m missing an opportunity by not reading his email out loud, because I’d have to be very shouty and it would be hard on my voice. But especially that last sentence would be most appropriate screamed at a loud volume.

PZ, you are a deranged coward who ought to kill himself, but I APOLOGIZE FOR NOT MENTIONING THIS IN MY FIRST EMAIL!!!!!!! GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!! Yours, Phil.

An AiG apostate!

Well, this is fascinating: a former employee of Answers in Genesis comes out with her story.

What I found unsurprising is that AiG is an authoritarian tyranny that abuses its workers, with people monitoring social media of employees outside of work hours and threatening them with firing if they step out of line, on top of all the oppressive requirements to get a job there in the first place.

She came from a faith tradition that thought AiG was too liberal (I shudder to imagine it — some of her fellow employees even wore pants, which surely put them on a slippery slope to atheism). But she did not hurtle into godless evilutionism herself. What led to her breakaway from AiG was the exploitive work conditions and her growing awareness of the hypocrisy of her religion, and she now calls herself an agnostic who is on the fence about evolution vs. creation.

That’s all we can ask for, that people think honestly about their beliefs and avoid dogma.

Oh, man, Ken Ham is going to be so pissed off about this video.

Parasites flooding the COVID-19 literature with toxic nonsense

A viewer of my video about the claim that viruses come from space noticed something I had ignored: the list of coauthors on the Steele/Wickramasinghe paper. Wickramasinghe always stacks on a long list of coauthors, which is probably one of the ways he manages to buy in support for his trash papers. Anyway, one of his coauthors is peculiar: a fellow named Robert Temple, who is affiliated with something called The History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation, which appears to be nothing but a flashy website…an odd choice when you’re asked to list your prestigious associations. But then, Temple only has an undergraduate degree and exercises little discrimination in what he puts on his CV — I get the impression he’s one of those people desperate to get academic validation, but not so desperate that he’s willing to do the work.

His name seems to find its way on a fair number of Wickramasinghe’s papers, like this one, Growing Evidence against Global Infection-Driven by Person-to-Person Transfer of COVID-19, which tries to argue that you can’t get infected by contact with fluids from other people, so, by implication, everyone who has COVID-19 was directly infected by an infall of the virus from outer space. There may be some transmission through handshakes, he claims, but it’s primarily caused by a rain of viruses from space. This is irresponsible nonsense, and one could ask what the heck a guy with an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit is doing on the list of authors anyway. I guess if it also includes Brig Klyce, who my fellow old-timers from talk.origins will remember as the panspermia wackaloon who haunted newsgroups, they might as well chuck in any ol’ weirdo who voices support for their claims.

Jason Colavito has the full scoop on Temple. His claim to fame rests on a book called The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, in which he argues that “amphibious extraterrestrials from Sirius” provided advanced scientific knowledge to the Dogon people and to the Sumerians and to any random ancient culture he doesn’t believe was smart enough to actually have done the things they did.

Yeah, he’s one of those pseudoarchaeologists who believes in ancient astronauts. On the basis of those exemplary credentials, he’s now getting stuffed onto papers by the Panspermia Mafia. If you must, you can listen to him blather on for over an hour and a half on the Dogon people (I wasn’t able to listen to it — he’s one of the more goddamn boring and pretentious lecturers I’ve ever heard). Also, annoyingly, he calls himself “Professor Temple”, despite having no academic appointment anywhere. He obviously knows nothing about virology, epidemiology, or biology in general — he’s just a poseur who gets his name on papers he’s not qualified to critique. But then, I could say the same thing about Chandra Wickramasinghe.

When I tried to track down this coauthor, though, another discovery is that the Wickramasinghe group have gone on a disgraceful binge recently, taking advantage of legitimate concerns about the pandemic to flood various journals with bad papers about COVID-19. I’ll repeat what I said before: if a paper has Wickramasinghe’s name on it, it’s garbage. Use his name as a filter, and you’ll cull out a lot of dross. It’s too bad the scientific publishers haven’t figured this out yet and blacklisted him, as they should.

Every step in this sequence is equally stupid

Here’s an unremarkable correlation in idiocy.

  • You want to have an elaborate “gender reveal” party. We could stop right there, you can just fuck off now, I don’t want to be your friend.
  • You decide the reveal will be by some kind of flashy pyrotechnics. If you want to tell me the sex of your incipient child, just say “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl”. That’s adequate. I don’t need a flashy garnish. Congratulations!
  • You are going to set off your fireworks in CALIFORNIA? And you live there? And you’ve been warned over and over about the fire danger?

Well, that’s a regular cascade of predictable foolishness, with the end result of the El Dorado Fire. Brilliant.

Today is a holiday?

You know what that means — I get to spend the whole day catching up on grading and prep work for upcoming labs.

I scarcely know what “day off” means anymore. Somebody will have to explain it to me someday, but there’s no point now. Maybe when I reach that mythical state of retired, if ever that happens.

Oh! I did have a weird dream last night, that I had a massive abdominal tumor that surgeons cut out of me, and they proudly showed it to me when I was lying there on the operating table (of course I was wide awake and watching the procedure). It was marbled with fatty tissue and had tufts of blonde hair sprouting sparsely all over it, with a little knot of teeth at one end. They stabbed it with biopsy needles a bunch of times, sliced it open to show me all the pus inside, and then threw it into an incinerator. I said, “We have to name it Donald.” Then I woke up.

It was a very happy dream. Prophetic symbolism, you think?