You’re a dope. #sorrynotsorry

These people exist.

Imagine Typhoid Karen here, and others like her, undermining every effort to contain the spread of a disease by intentionally moving from area to area, finding the places with the most lax enforcement of standards, and dispersing the infection as much as she can. She’s pretty intelligent, for a virus.

Any sick people in Idaho can blame their governor and people like her.

Here’s another one: Kelly Anne Wolfe in Toronto. She has 13 degrees in psychology and is a member of MENSA, so you’ll never be as smart as her…and she’s handing out fake mask exemption cards to passers-by.

Man, I’m such a failure. I only have 2 degrees, a bachelor’s and a Ph.D. She’s like 6.5 times smarter than me!

Darwin cancelled?

Noah Carl is a notorious racist who was fired from a position at Cambridge for racism. Now he’s complaining that Darwin might get “cancelled” because he wrote racist stuff in the 19th century. Yeah, so? Would that mean we couldn’t worship Darwin as a god anymore? Because we don’t anyway.

So I had to grumble a bit.

I don’t even know what “cancelled” means yet.

I can fix this plan!

Sure, this is a little problem for a plan to open schools in Utah. They have to prepare to inform people if anyone dies.

I can fix it, though! Just delete that bullet point. Poof, gone, no worries, at least, not until it actually happens.

My university has a plan, too. It’s called the Return to Campus plan. They seem to be instinctively following my advice and not mentioning the awkwardnesses that would follow if the plan doesn’t work. There’s a lot of questions there that they answer neatly, but the ones I want to ask aren’t there. See, if the question doesn’t exist, you don’t have to have an answer to the problem! So, I wonder:

Will tests be available on campus? What do students & staff have to do to get one? How often will testing be done? Are there conditions for mandatory testing?

What about contact tracing? If a student, for instance, is diagnosed with COVID-19, will we trace and test and isolate anyone they were in contact with? Or do we just shut the whole campus down?

How will the success of the opening plan be evaluated? Are there criteria in place for re-establishing a lockdown? Is there a number of cases or deaths that will make the administration reverse course? Do we only abandon the plan if we get 1% student deaths?

I notice that, in the plan, there is a vague mention of our study abroad programs. Is anyone aware that most countries have closed their borders to US travel? Even Canada!

Has there been any consideration of our liabilities? With all the fiscal concerns, are we prepared for lawsuits?

Speaking of money, do the faculty get hazard pay? Oops, how silly, We’re getting pay cuts instead.

Returning to the original point, who at the university has been assigned the job of writing the casualty letters? My son, the one who is serving in the army, has been periodically put on death duty — one week periods in which he is responsible for traveling to families to inform them of military deaths in his unit. It sounds like a horrible job, and it is. Who is taking that responsibility here?

I know, discussing these possibilities just makes the whole plan look half-assed. Never mind, just pretend I didn’t ask.

Why did I ever leave the lab?

Today’s adventure in spidering was a trip to SWELL, the Scandia Woods Environmental Learning Lab. It’s a lovely place. I hated it.

There is a lake there. The lake has a thick marshy boundary, and outside that, a path through thick woods leading to a classroom that, in normal times, is used for school children’s field trips. It is lush and damp and overgrown, and you know what that means, boys and girls? In Minnesota? Yes, it means that the actual purpose of this site is to lure in delicate tasty young children so that their blood may feed the Mosquito Gods. If an old guy wanders in, well, all the better — a nice snack.

I had sprayed myself thoroughly with picaridin before we left. For some strange reason, perhaps the possession of arcane foreknowledge, the head of the trail had a mailbox containing a supply of Deep Woods Off. And a hammer. The hammer was a mystery for a short while. As we walked down the trail, the mosquitoes descended upon us. I had hosed myself with so much insect repellant that my skin was layered with a shiny sheen (which is even now drying to a lacey craquelure.) It did me no good. Apparently I was supposed to use the hammer. Part of the problem was that there many spiders, mostly tiny unfortunately, and I was frequently stopping and trying to photograph the things, and that was the signal for a pack of voracious beasts to charge in whining.

Also aggravating: Mary had no problems at all. I guess we know which of us is the succulent, luscious one now! Or was. I’m kind of dessicated after that experience.

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Doom doom doom doom.

Stevens County, where I live, used to have 0 cases of COVID-19. Then it went up to 1, then 4, then 8, and now it’s 11. Yet still no one is taking it seriously, the local grocery store is making excuses about not enforcing reasonable precautions (they’ve met the minimal standards required by the law, don’t you know), and the students are still due to arrive in about a month.

Fuck me. Fuck us all, every one.

Also, I don’t want to be this guy. Sad as his story is, this guy was killing other people with his behavior.

There are just too many Richard Roses around, and they’re going to claw us down into the grave with them.

Or this:

COVID parties? What the hell is wrong with people?

If you thought the McCloskeys were horrible people before…

…you need to read this article about their legal history. I said “holy shit” more than once reading about all the legal games those two litigious assholes have engaged in. It’s all they do! Sue people! Steal land by suing people! Threaten people with lawsuits! Their neighbors hate them! Their family, what’s left of it, hates them!

My favorite part was where McCloskey’s father sent him a birthday card and a bag of dirt promising him ownership of a 240 acre farm, but didn’t actually bother to get a legal transfer of ownership. Later, Mark McCloskey was written out of his father’s will — I guess a lifetime of being an asshole to everyone around you has that kind of consequence — so what does he do? Guess! He sues everyone!

In March 2013, in Phelps County, Mark McCloskey sued his father and his father’s trust over the gift. The birthday card and earth, he claimed, were sufficient title because they met the legal definition of “livery of seisin,” a ceremony performed in medieval England for the conveyance of land.

In 2016, a special judge ruled against him, writing that “Exhibit 1 attached to the petition is a birthday card, not a deed” and that it was too late to claim ownership of part of the farm. The archaic legal claim, the judge ruled “does not operate as a matter of law to transfer title to real property.”

Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014.

McCloskey now claims his life was ruined by the notorious photo of the happy couple threatening protesters passing by with guns. I don’t think that’s what ruined it. I hope the two of them face a bitter, lonely, hate-filled life together from now on, they’ve earned it.

I have a special, deep antipathy to litigious assholes, I must confess.

Went looking for Vikings at the Rune Stone Park, only found…

…spiders.

There are lots of things with the “Runestone” moniker attached in my area: Runestone Telecom Association, Runestone Apartments, Runestone Mobile Home Park, etc., etc., and there’s a park called Kensington Rune Stone Park just 40 minutes away from me. I decided to take a trip out there.

That’s a rather nice building to honor a fake carved rock supposedly left by Vikings visiting Minnesota in the 14th century. It’s empty now, probably due mostly to the pandemic, but it’s not clear what they do there — it contains a big empty meeting space, perhaps for lectures about Vikings. The Olaf Ohman farmhouse is there and a big barn and some nicely maintained grassy grounds. The notorious Runestone itself is not there — it has a separate museum of its own in Alexandria, 20 minutes away. It’s all rather embarrassing.

But we didn’t care we were there for spiders. We found a few!

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Gussying up creationism with math doesn’t make it valid

I’m trying to read this article, “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems” by Thorvaldsen and Hössjer, and wondering why I even bother, and why the Journal of Theoretical Biology bothered to publish it, because a) it undermines its own premise in the introduction, b) it’s loaded with irrelevant math, c) it contains no observations or experiments, and d) at the end it devolves into the usual circle jerk of references to the usual suspects in the Intelligent Design community. I had to throw up my hands and give up. It’s just mathematicians juggling assumptions and numbers to come to the conclusion they want.

The one interesting aspect is that unlike the Discovery Institute gang, they do give clear explanations of what they mean by “design” and “fine tuning” — it’s just that, once you read them, you feel like telling them that their work is done, further noodling about is pointless. Maybe that’s why the Intelligent Design creationists try harder to fog over the meaning of the words they use?

Anyway, here’s the only interesting stuff in the whole thing.

The term fine-tuning is used to characterize sensitive dependences of functions or properties on the values of certain parameters (cf. Friederich, 2018). While technological devices are fine-tuned products of actual engineers and manufacturers who designed and built them, only sensitivity with respect to the values of certain parameters or initial conditions are considered sufficient in the present paper. We define fine-tuning as an object with two properties: it must a) be unlikely to have occurred by chance, under the relevant probability distribution (i.e. complex), and b) conform to an independent or detached specification (i.e. specific).

To which I would reply that a) unlikely events happen all the time, so mere measures of probability, especially after the fact, are of little consequence, and b) groovy, so does this mean you are going to provide an independent or detached specification for a specific evolutionary event? [Answer: No, they are not.] If your definition requires addressing two parameters, and at the very outset of your project you have to admit that you don’t have the second one and that playing mathematical games cannot provide it, then aren’t we done? That was the second paragraph of the whole article, which makes for a quick read, too.

But no, sorry, they go on.

The notion of design is also widely used within both historic and contemporary science (Thorvaldsen and Øhrstrøm, 2013). The concept will need a description for its use in our setting. A design is a specification or plan for the construction of an object or system, or the result of that specification or plan in the form of a product.

Yes, yes. I’ve been saying this for years. If you want to claim there was a design for an organism, show me the blueprint from which it was built, and I’ll believe you. If you go to Mars and find a set of billion year old program specifications for Project Mouse, laid out by the Martian designers, with a couple of thousand manuals that lay out the details of the biochemistry, physiology, and morphology of Mus musculus, then I’ll have to admit that you’ve got solid evidence that mice are the product of design. You’ve said it right there in your definition, that you have to have a specification or plan the precedes the product.

Except then they immediately waffle. All you need is the product itself, and then you get to infer the specification or plan. That makes no sense. I can find a pebble in my yard which is unique in all of its particulars, where every scrape and mark and fracture sets it apart from otherwise similar pebbles. The probability of that specific pebble having its specific constellation of attributes is minuscule. Are you going to try and tell me that therefore there is somewhere on file in the Great Designer’s filing cabinet a project laid out for Pebble, Minnesota, 21st Century, Myers yard, grey, roughly ovoid? You might believe that’s the case, but I’d like to see it.

Instead, we get a lesson in etymology. I had to laugh, this is so ridiculously irrelevant.

The very term design is from the Medieval Latin word “designare” (denoting “mark out, point out, choose”); from “de” (out) and “signum” (identifying mark, sign). Hence, a public notice that advertises something or gives information.

Great. So where’s the public notice? Somewhere in the main Megabrantis office which is open on Tuesdays, between 1 and 1:15pm, standard Vogsphere time?

The design usually has to satisfy certain goals and constraints. It is also expected to interact with a certain environment, and thus be realized in the physical world. Humans have a powerful intuitive understanding of design that precedes modern science. Our common intuitions invariably begin with recognizing a pattern as a mark of design. The problem has been that our intuitions about design have been unrefined and pre-theoretical. For this reason, it is relevant to ask ourselves whether it is possible to turn the tables on this disparity and place those rough and pre-theoretical intuitions on a firm scientific foundation.

Just once, please consider that our intuitions can be wrong, rather than struggling to find some mathematical justification for them.

Unfortunately, the paper is primarily about fine tuning, allowing them to ignore this problem, and they’re going to move on.

Fine-tuning and design are related entities. Fine-tuning is a bottom-up method, while design is more like a top-down approach. Hence, we focus on the topic of fine-tuning in the present paper and address the following questions: Is it possible to recognize fine-tuning in biological systems at the levels of functional proteins, protein groups and cellular networks? Can fine-tuning in molecular biology be formulated using state of the art statistical methods, or are the arguments just “in the eyes of the beholder”?

Yes. We are quite confident that biological organisms have been fine tuned by natural selection. Is that what you mean?

There’s no point in worrying about it, though, because after I read the following sentence I threw my hard copy of the paper in the trash.

The chances that the universe should be life permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable.

But…but…if they’re incalculable, then how did you determine that they are infinitesimal? Jesus. Creationist mathematicians.

My brain unconsciously turned to spiders

Chuck Wendig has a list of ten things you can do to persist “in this epoch of syphilitic dipshittery”. It’s not bad. I’ve been following this advice without knowing it for a while. But he left one off.

11. Do your spiders. That’s right. Find a new obsession, the more weird and off the wall it is, the better. Just concentrate for a while every day on it, turn it into an art and science, and identify with your spiders. Because I tell you, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s healthier and saner than the politics in your country right now.

So that’s my plan for today. I shall retire to my lab and office, fiddle about with some new apparatus, fuss over my spiders, and someday, when the time is right, we shall conquer the world and end the reign of foolish primates.

You’ve all got your spiders, or spider-substitutes. What are they? What will you do today to expand your domain?