Confessions of a has-been atheist

I gave up on creationist debates when I realized I was being taken advantage of — I’ve always been willing to do these engagements as an opportunity for science communication, so I wouldn’t charge anything except for travel expenses. Then I did one event where, after getting there, I learned that there was a banquet planned for their honored creationist speaker, to which I was not invited. Then I discovered that he was put up in a suite in the big hotel in town, but I was told that surely I’d be able to find a motel somewhere nearby. That’s the kind of respect you get from creationists.

Atheists aren’t much better.

Would you believe I still get tentative invitations to speak at atheist conferences? (For the past 6 months, those have all been online events, of course.) I hardly believe it myself, since I consider myself persona non grata in atheist circles, but apparently some people have good memories of events I’ve done in the past, and they call or email me. “Hey, we’re in the planning stages SuperAtheistCon, and your name has been suggested as a potential speaker. Are you interested?” And I’d say, sure, if I’m free that day. They’d ask for the usual headshot and bio, and sometimes they’d ask for an abstract for the talk, and sometimes they’d even ask for a complete outline of my topic, which was usually something science-related. I’d provide what they’d ask for, and let it lie. Then, usually, silence. I’d never hear from them again.

I’d just figure, “wow, my idea must have been really boring,” which may well have been the case, and that’s OK.

A few times, I’d get a regretful call back. They decided not to go with me, after all, because one of their board members objected that I was a feminist or an SJW (unspoken: the rest of the board went along with what they thought was a legitimate complaint), and also they landed some Hitchens-loving islamophobic misogynist speaker who was more popular than me, and now they’re out of money. Fair call.

One event even got to the point where I had all the slides done for a talk when they pulled the plug. It’s sinking in that I’m not ever going to speak at an atheist conference ever again, and that atheist conferences have achieved a kind of uniformly vaguely right-wing ambience that means they don’t want me, and that I don’t want them.

That’s all fine, I do not expect to be given a platform. However, please stop pestering me with tentative requests that you and I both know will get squelched by the dominant right-wingers in your organization, especially if that request is accompanied by a demand that I do the work of providing a justification for myself. It’s getting old and really hardening me in my cynicism.

P.S. I have zero sympathy for those professional atheists who whine about getting stiffed by conference organizers like Pangburn Philosophy. Sorry, guys, I’ve always done it for the cause and not for the money, so your petty bourgeois demands leave me cold. You’re doing it for the cash, and you got robbed by capitalist parasites, but still you defend the status quo? Boo hoo.

P.P.S. Maybe another reason I get disinvited from conferences is that they know I might sneer at their headliners.

On this day 157 years ago

I don’t know that my Minnesota ancestors fought in the Civil War, but the Iowa side of the family did, in the Western campaigns under Grant. I’ve been in this state for 20 years, my mother and grandparents were born here, so it’s fair that I take a little pride in the bravery of the 1st Minnesota.

No Minnesotan should ever flaunt the Confederate flag.

The “Home of the People Lovers” is going to kill us

I just had to make a harrowing trip to our local grocery store — harrowing, because no one wears face masks around here, I’ve seen one employee routinely wear one, and as I run my errands I see old people, middle-aged people, young people milling about, often stopping for annoying chit-chat with Ole and Lena in the aisles. I swear, when the pandemic comes swirling back into this county, the central locus for infection will be this store…and the churches. This community simply does not take the threat seriously. Except for the bubble of the university, this is also a county that went for Trump, by the way.

The headline on the Minneapolis Star Tribune right now is “Walz might mandate face masks”. Might. This is madness. The entire country was pretending that the pandemic was over, opening businesses, encouraging everyone to get out and shop and drink and celebrate, when nothing had changed, and now that the numbers are starting to rise again, there is this dull, dim glimmering that gosh, maybe we ought to do something to prevent the spread of disease. They’re going to be dilatory about it all, of course.

It’s not just Texas and Florida. We’ve got these indecisive, dishonest weasels working behind the scenes up here in Minnesota, too.

And goddamn, Willie’s SuperValu, get your act together. You’ve got a “coronavirus alert” link on your web page that hasn’t been updated since early April, and you haven’t taken a single responsible action to limit the spread of disease in your store, other than raising your prices.

I’ll be coming for your neutrons, Brian

I’ve got an infrared thermometer, and I’m not afraid to use it.

Brian should be terrified.

Should we explain to him that:

  • I think he meant “neurons”, not “neutrons”. Neither are destroyed by an infrared thermometer.
  • While many infrared thermometers have a laser to identify the spot being measured, it’s low intensity and doesn’t penetrate the skin. Or the bones of the cranium. Or the brain, or “brian”.
  • They work by measuring the infrared radiation emitted by your skin. Not by zapping you.

So this is the quality of the opposition to basic health care measures? We’re doomed.

By the way, I have one for measuring the approximate temperature of spiders. I couldn’t find a regular thermometer tiny enough to shove up their bottoms. (Also, they’re not particularly accurate — I’m primarily measuring the approximate temperature of their environment.)

Jeffrey Epstein’s procurer has been arrested

Finally, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s enabler/associate/partner in crime, has been arrested. Now it might get interesting — Epstein may be dead, but Maxwell knew as much if not more about his activities and all the people who took advantage of their ‘hospitality’. I wonder if she’ll spill the beans, or if she’ll conveniently decide to commit ‘suicide’? There may be some members of the European and American aristocracy sweating right now.

There’s no drama like YouTube drama

You’ve probably heard the old joke about how academic squabbles are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Academic pettiness pales in comparison to the nastiness of peak YouTube stars. The latest saga is a lot of vicious gossip between ‘famous’ people on YouTube who I’ve never heard of before and never watch, yet who make millions of dollars off cheesy videos that fans flock to. I don’t understand any of it, but don’t watch their videos, just read this article that summarizes “The New Shane Dawson-Tati Westbrook-Jeffree Star YouTube Drama”. You should feel content to say “who?” and just ignore them.

However, the deeper problem is either YouTube itself, or humanity in general. YouTube has cleverly boxed themselves in with an arcane self-reinforcing algorithm that rewards the worst people — think Pewdiepie, or Jake and Logan Paul, or Shane Dawson — who have no talent at all, no useful information, no skills except for self-promotion, and vaults them to the top of the charts and rewards them with buckets of cash. Furthermore, one of the secrets of success exemplified by the four I just named is pandering to children. Those four specialize in doing stupid shit as adults performing for kids and acquire hordes of uncritical followers as a consequence, and YouTube is a willing accomplice.

Stop incentivizing garbage, YouTube. You’ve got to realize that something has gone horribly wrong when you see the outcome of your algorithm, which seems to favor Nazis and pedophiles and, as always, no-talent hacks.

Punching Rhawn Joseph some more

I’ve made the big leagues. I’m cited on c/net in a review of panspermia claims.

Joseph is an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a shirt unbuttoned to his stomach. He is, according to his autobiography, a well-known and acclaimed neurobiologist. He enjoys the ocean, walking along the beach and hiking. His self-published articles argue life has been found on Mars and Venus, and propagate an alternative view of life’s beginnings.

That theory is “panspermia.” It holds that life first arose in space and that planets in the solar system were “seeded” with microbes carried across the cosmos by dust, meteors and debris.

“Panspermia is one of those things where all the biologists are saying, ‘Maybe it could have happened, but we don’t have any evidence for it’,” says Paul Myers, a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Myers has refuted the theory in the past, leading to clashes with Joseph and his colleagues, a group he calls “the panspermia mafia.”

Two of panspermia’s biggest proponents are famed astronomer Fred Hoyle, who died in 2001, and his protege Chandra Wickramasinghe. Hoyle helped unravel “stellar nucleosynthesis,” a process that occurs in stars to generate all the chemical elements in the cosmos and, in collaboration with Wickramasinghe, the pair discovered the organic material that makes up cosmic dust. However, in the latter parts of their careers, the two have made controversial claims with little evidence to back them up, including the idea that viruses, like the flu and coronavirus, come from space.

Myers says the academic pedigree of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe gave panspermia an air of credibility in the 1970s, helping the pair popularize it as a renegade view of the origins of life. But the theory has served as a launching pad for nonsensical, pseudoscientific theories — including Joseph’s belief that Mars is full of mushrooms, fungi and lichen.

Wickramasinghe remains the godfather of panspermia, continuing to publish on the theory in books and his own journals. Rhawn Gabriel Joseph is the heir apparent.

It’s not just me, of course. They review his claim of mushrooms sprouting on Mars.

How Joseph’s piece moved past the peer review process and was accepted for publication remains a mystery. The process usually weeds out these explicitly non-scientific claims. Other astronomers and astrobiologists who examined the research soundly rebuked its conclusions, citing poor methodology and analysis.

Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University in Australia, said “there’s some pretty horrible over-interpretation of blurry photos,” while Gretchen Benedix, a geophysicist at Curtin University in Australia, noted “increasing image sizes to investigate the objects of interest does not change the resolution of the image and therefore does not give better analysis of the objects of interest.”

Rocco Mancinelli, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Astrobiology, called the science and logic “completely flawed,” and said he would recommend it be rejected for publication.

A NASA spokesperson told me “the consensus of the majority of the scientific community is that current conditions on the surface of Mars are not suitable for liquid water or complex life.”

As the article points out, Rhawn Joseph and his cronies have been tainting a scientific subdiscipline for decades, relying on promotion by tabloids to generate the illusion of authority.

Over the last decade, Joseph and JOC have mostly been ignored by NASA and by the scientific community. Very few scientists take the alien fungi claims seriously, but Joseph’s work has been highlighted in UK tabloids, RT and many well-meaning science news sites since February 2019. Some have touted Joseph’s websites as “scientific journals” and even confused Joseph’s vanity website with legitimate, similarly named journals. One painted Joseph as someone trying to “defy the odds.”

And that’s where the danger lies.

Astrobiology, the search for and study of extraterrestrial life, is a serious scientific endeavor. NASA has an astrobiology program, and searching for life is a critical part of its Mars exploration program. And although the public seems resistant to fanciful claims of fungal spores on Mars or lichen on Venus, they haven’t gone away. If anything, social media seems to have made us more gullible. As crank, fringe theories start to gather steam in honest peer-reviewed journals, the public’s perception of astrobiology can quickly be muddied.

Let’s hope this is the end of Joseph and Wickramasinghe.

I doubt that it will be. They’re going to continue to dump junk science into the literature.

I keep telling you, I refuse to get into ants

Nope, no way. They just keep getting in the way of finding spiders.

We took a walk out by our Horticulture Display Gardens, which recently reopened — but with sensible restrictions, like social distancing and masks and arrows designating the directions for walking. It was a little disappointing. Oh, sure, flowers and all that stuff, but our timing was off, because last night the area got pummeled by a brutal storm, there were downed trees and tree branches everywhere, and worst of all, most of the spider webs had been blown away. We found a few examples of spider survivors trying to recover from the catastrophe, like this brave little baby spider who had put together a beautifully formed orb web.

There were a few others around (posted on Instagram), but we’ll probably find more in a few days, once everything has dried out and they have a chance to do some reconstruction.

He’s not wrong, you know

A Republican delivers delicious commentary on masks.

Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said the divide over whether to cover one’s face is, like many things in the Trump era, political.

“Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” Castellanos said. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

That’s kind of true. The thing is that crosses and the hijab don’t affect COVID-19 transmission, while masks do. Recognizing the reality of the data does make you smarter and more rational (but not necessarily superior). As usual, though, this is an attempt to disparage evidence-based thinking by comparing it to religious thinking, when the accuser thinks religion is just ducky, making it also a weird smear against himself.