He’s lying

Trump claims to be taking hydroxychloroquine.

President Trump told reporters Monday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for about a week and a half and that the White House physician knows he is taking the anti-malaria drug despite the fact that he continues to test negative for the coronavirus.

Clinical trials, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger of the drug is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients, particularly those with heart problems. Trump dismissed those concerns, saying he has heard about the drug’s benefits from doctors and others he has spoken with.

You have to be closely monitored if you take this dangerous drug — there are all kinds of potential side effects. So we know he’s lying his ass off.

It’s also a lie that can get other people killed, if they believe him and try to emulate him.

On the other hand if he’s not lying, I hope he decides to quadruple his dose. Please.

My first Raspberry Pi

We put it together today, me and my nerdy daughter and my very excited granddaughter, who had to inspect each of the components.

She had to teach me a little (very little) Python, but we got it working with a little script to take time lapse images. That’s the camera at the top, and the two eyeballs are IR LEDs. The plan is to do a test run when I get back and see if we can record night-time spider activity with it. The spiders are very sneaky, and when I see them during the day they’re usually lounging about, doing little unless some prey falls into their web, but every morning I see the cages more densely matted with cobwebs, so it would be nice to watch them at work.

The images aren’t bad for such a minuscule lens. The test will be to see if I can get enough depth of field to get a sense of their 3-dimensional construction methods.

(If you’re curious, that’s the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Starter Kit and the UNIROI Raspberry Pi Camera Module.)

Not my usual welcome

Last night, I walked in the door of Iliana’s home. She was taken aback — there’s a strange man in the house! Then she figured it out. “Bopba?” she said. Then, “Phone?”. Once she figured out I was just the manifestation of the floating head she sees on the phone, she was alright with me. Also, I brought toys.

This is a weird time in human history.

I made it to Colorado!

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife has been isolated in Colorado — bad timing, she was visiting our family in late February, and all the stay-at-home orders started crashing down in mid-March — so yesterday was the day I was finally free of other obligations to make the long drive down to bring her back home. So here I am. Yeesh, was it a long drive. 14 hours from my door to Longmont, Colorado.

I had something to entertain me, though. The dullest portion of the trip was several hundred miles on I90 in South Dakota, which ought to be embarrassing to South Dakotans, since it exposes the soul of the state. It’s nothing but billboards, big ugly billboards, and they’re all advertising garbage. The most frequent billboards along that stretch of highway are:

  • Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug Wall Drug. Every mile or two there’s another sign to let you know Wall Drug is 292 miles (or whatever) ahead of you, sometimes mentioning some feature you will find there…Western Paintings or Dinosaurs or Cowboy Boots, or to let you know they were mentioned in Reader’s Digest or the New York Times or People magazine.

    I’ve been there, once, almost 20 years ago. It’s a hole-in-the-wall in the middle of nowhere. It’s a rustic strip mall, splattered with kitsch. No, you do not want to visit Wall Drug, unless you have a burning desire for a plastic key chain with your name on it, or want to buy a bad cup of coffee for 5 cents.

  • 1880 Town. Never been there, but jeez they must be desperate. So many signs begging you to come see their blacksmith shop or kids, come get a deputy’s badge from the sheriff.

  • The Gutzom Borglum Story. Apparently, he has a museum somewhere near Mt Rushmore. It’s apparently very patriotic. I guess you could say the creator of that iconic eyesore is patriotic, if taking over native lands, appropriating a beautiful natural mountain, and dynamiting it until it looks like a quartet of politicians is a sublimely American version of patriotism. Been there once, too. Never again.

It does tell you what works in advertising, though. It’s not quality, or cleverness, or information — it’s just straight up mindless repetition. Drill your brand into people’s brains until they think it’s only natural to stop at Wall Drug and see what all the fuss is about. It’s awful. I hate it. It’s a blight on a lovely countryside, and I guarantee you that if those businesses didn’t have thousands of signs poisoning traveler’s brains, no one would bother to stop at those pointless places, and they would dry up and blow away. The demand is entirely artificial.

Which makes it amusing that as I got closer to each of them, their billboards started sporting “CLOSED” notices.

Also amusing: frequently, but with nowhere near the frequency of those tourist traps, landowners along the route started emulating the capitalist advertising policies and putting up their own little advertisements: “JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS” was popular. The comparison does not help their cause. It seems that repeating a meaningless mantra is effective at getting people to parrot it back, but it also cheapens it. Jesus is the Wall Drug of religion: cheesy schlock for the masses that is ultimately disappointing, building a following on empty reiteration of slogans.

I puked on Evolutionary Psychology before it was cool to puke on Evolutionary Psychology

I rejected it because it’s panadaptationist nonsense, among other things. But I’m always happy to see more arguments for why it is garbage, such as this criticism from a philosopher.

Evolutionary psychologists’ thought is that, for at least some of our behaviors, they believe that we have—dare I use this term—hard-wired cognitive structures that are operating in all of us contemporary human beings the same way they did for our ancestors on the savannas. The idea is that, in the modern world, we have sort of modern skulls, but the wiring—the cognitive structure of the brain itself—is not being modified, because enough evolutionary time hasn’t passed. This goes for evolutionary functions like mate selection, parental care, predator avoidance—that our brains were pretty much in the same state as our ancestors’ brains. The sameness in how our brains work is on account of genetic selection for particular modules that are still functional in our environment today. [Editor’s note: These “modules” refer to the idea that the brain can be divided up into discrete structures with specific functions.]

The matching problem is really the core issue that evolutionary psychologists have to show that they can meet: that there is really a match between our modules and the modules of the prehistoric ancestors; that they’re working the same way then as now; and that these modules are working the same way because they are descended from the same functional lineage or causal lineage. But I don’t see any way that these charges can be answered.

True, that. But just watch — evolutionary psychologists will rapidly retreat from those core ideas of “environment of evolutionary adaptation” and “modules” to find safety in the uncontroversial idea that the brain evolved.

We still get buckets of baloney about evolution from people who should know better. Have you heard of the pugilism hypothesis? This is the idea that men’s beards evolved to absorb a punch to the jaw. You only have to think about it for a moment to realize that getting socked in the face was a small factor in human evolution — 10,000 years ago, I would have been more concerned about starvation, getting a disease, breaking an arm while hunting, or getting thwocked in the back of the head with a rock by a bad guy. That facial hair might have provided a slight cushion to facial injuries doesn’t seem like the kind of thing for which there was much selection pressure, and I could also sit here and imagine all kinds of drawbacks to furry faces.

But it’s been tested! Except no, it hasn’t.

Because facial hair is one of the most sexually dimorphic features of humans (Homo sapiens) and is often perceived as an indicator of masculinity and social dominance, human facial hair has been suggested to play a role in male contest competition. Some authors have proposed that the beard may function similar to the long hair of a lion’s mane, serving to protect vital areas like the throat and jaw from lethal attacks. This is consistent with the observation that the mandible, which is superficially covered by the beard, is one of the most commonly fractured facial bones in interpersonal violence. We hypothesized that beards protect the skin and bones of the face when human males fight by absorbing and dispersing the energy of a blunt impact. We tested this hypothesis by measuring impact force and energy absorbed by a fiber epoxy composite, which served as a bone analog, when it was covered with skin that had thick hair (referred to here as “furred”) versus skin with no hair (referred to here as “sheared” and “plucked”). We covered the epoxy composite with segments of skin dissected from domestic sheep (Ovis aries), and used a drop weight impact tester affixed with a load cell to collect force versus time data. Tissue samples were prepared in three conditions: furred (n = 20), plucked (n = 20), and sheared (n = 20). We found that fully furred samples were capable of absorbing more energy than plucked and sheared samples. For example, peak force was 16% greater and total energy absorbed was 37% greater in the furred compared to the plucked samples. These differences were due in part to a longer time frame of force delivery in the furred samples. These data support the hypothesis that human beards protect vulnerable regions of the facial skeleton from damaging strikes.

I would concede even before testing it that a layer of hair over the face would reduce the force of impacts to some degree. But that’s not testing an evolutionary hypothesis! You need to show that this ‘padding’ had a measurable effect on survival and reproductive success. They merely looked at one superficial phenomenon and decided that dissipating the force of a punch to the jaw allowed beardy guys to thrive, in a world without the Marquis of Queensbury rules. It seems his beard didn’t save Otzi from the arrow that killed him.

There are a few people — thankfully few — that go wacko over their single comprehensive explanation. Apparently, humans evolved to be boxers.

More broadly, the results of this study add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that specialization for male fighting has played a significant role in the evolution of the musculoskeletal system of humans. For example, the short limbs (Carrier 2007), plantigrade foot posture (Carrier and Cunningham 2017), and bipedal posture of our earliest hominins ancestors (Carrier 2011), and the force–velocity tuning (Carrier et al. 2011) and size (Carrier et al. 2015) of the muscles of the human leg may also be associated with improved fighting performance.

Ugh. Umbrella Hypothesis alert.

What about the fall?

I’m not quite done with grading — genetics is complete! — but yeah, I already have to think about Fall semester? Yikes. I’m expecting a resurgence of the coronavirus this summer that will be worse than what we had in the spring, because we a) don’t have adequate testing, b) don’t have a vaccine, and c) have a country infested with idjits who want to get a haircut no matter how many other people’s lives it puts at risk. Meanwhile, the universities are dithering about what to do. I have no idea what I’m expected to do come September, although we’re kind of mumbling about contingency plans.

This is a fairly clear-eyed view of the immediate future.

Higher education as we know it is approaching economic collapse. I appreciate the frantic gestures college presidents are making to prevent their own campuses from failing. Many intend to open their campuses for the fall term and avoid economic ruin. It is the wrong call.

Even the most optimistic of epidemiologists have two opinions about the remaining months of 2020: mass gatherings should be prohibited, and people over 55 and/or with pre-existing conditions should continue to stay indoors. We also know that individuals under 25 are least likely to become sick with the coronavirus and are most likely to flout requests to stay indoors, wear masks and avoid public places such as beaches and parks.

College presidents are unsure about what to do with their campuses in the fall, and uncertainty breeds anxiety. No one has a crystal ball, but with what we know, what should happen on the nation’s campuses in the fall is increasingly clear. The option of students returning to campus in the fall is not viable, regardless of the economic implications.

The author has some suggestions about what to do if we are open: cancel all those big stadium football games, make special provisions for faculty and students over 55 (we have to teach online, while the younger faculty teach in classes? I think he has an elevated opinion of the safety of young adults), constant testing (we don’t have a reliable, affordable test), and maintain social distancing in the classroom. OK, so I looked at my list of registered students for the Fall to see if that is feasible. Enrollments are down everywhere, right?

I’ll be teaching cell biology, which typically has about 50 students. It’s down a lot right now, with 35 students registered, although it will probably go up a little bit more over the summer. I’ve been assigned a huge lecture hall, so social distancing in class will be easy — I can put them in every 3rd or 4th seat, every other row, and have room left over. Lecture will be easy.

The problem will be labs. I have 3 lab sections for those 35 students, and we generally have students work in groups. That’s not going to work. Making it work would require major restructuring — break up the labs into more independent study sections, so we can separate them more? Even there, any infected students are going to spray fomites all over the microscopes and spectrophotometers. Need I point out, though, this is where the students who will one day be the front line in dealing with future pandemics will get their start?

I imagine our administration is freaking out.

Greater than 5 percent of the more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities are likely to close because of falling enrollment, according to Robert Zemsky. Many observers now predict that enrollments will shrink by 15 percent. The pandemic and the Trump administration’s xenophobia alone will shrink foreign student enrollment, especially from China and India, by 25 percent, the American Council on Education has estimated. Meanwhile, some states like New Jersey are already clawing back money from campuses that has been allocated for this fiscal year; next year’s budgets will be worse than the recession in every state. Philanthropic giving will take a nose dive. Summer and auxiliary enterprises will yield next to no additional revenue.

College presidents have a right to be terrified. But opening campuses in the fall is the wrong move if the primary motivation is to avoid bankruptcy. Public health comes first.

Right. Public health must come first. The answer ought to be a massive public investment in educational and medical infrastructure to keep us all limping along until this disease is overcome. Will we get it? No. It’s hard not to feel a sense of impending doom when we witness the government overseeing this disaster.

So, right now I focus on finishing this last semester, which already ended in a colossal pratfall. Once that’s done, maybe I can think about how to manage the next one.

Hey, rigorous training in how to clean and sterilize a workspace would be an appropriate first lab in cell biology, right?