I think that there might be other forces that kill my favorite YouTube channels

I feel somewhat uneasy about the message in this video: it’s the idea that YouTube channels that have high production costs that need to be subsidized by organizations like NSF are in danger.

It’s true. We risk losing high quality stuff, while keeping right-wing subsidized garbage (like PragerU) and we don’t want that. So in that sense I agree 100% with the message.

But there’s a greater danger, and it’s been here all along. It’s the YouTube algorithm, which is already designed to favor clickbait, rage content, and sensationalist lies. The most heavily viewed YT pages are obscenities, not in the sexual sense, but in an intellectual sense. PewDiePie, MrBeast, Tim Poole, and a nightmarish swarm of repetitive, AI-generated children’s cartoon channels — the current is flowing strongly against science media.

I don’t think funding from NASA or NSF or local universities to do science outreach, which is a good thing, is going to be able to succeed against the biases of corporate YouTube. But keep on trying!

My senator is doing the work

Tina Smith, one of our Minnesota senators, has announced that she won’t be running for another term, unfortunately. Or is that good? Can we get some young progressive DFL radical to fill her position? But as she enters the final leg of her term, she’s fighting back.

@SenTinaSmith: This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.
[Musk orders all federal employees to respond to an email]
@SenTinaSmith: I bet a lot of people had an experience like this with a bad boss — there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, “Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else.”
I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.

Bravo! Keep resisting!

This is an easy one to fight, at least. The order from Elon Musk is an ultimatum, sent out by someone with no official authority. It’s an incredibly stupid email.

With the subject line What did you do last week? the email demanded that every recipient reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. It then reassuringly instructed employees, do not send [emphasis Musk’s, I mean OPM’s, or whatever] any classified information, links, or attachments and finished with a deadline of this Monday at 11:59pmEST which was for some very phishy reason hyperlinked.

I am not averse to accountability — I just got an email from my division chair informing me that it’ll be time form my yearly review of what I’ve been up to, and that’s fine. I expect my local administrator to want to be aware of all faculty activity, and to file away that information as a record of my responsibilities. But she has the authority and responsibility (and, by the way, was elected by the faculty to perform that role). Anyone could send me an email demanding that I list what I did last week, but I get to laugh and click delete.

But this…this is madness. The Department of Government Efficiency thinks the way to enhance that efficiency is to demand that all employees file a list of what they did last week to some random email address? Last week…are they going to make this part of the weekly routine? What are they going to do with it? And just five?

OK, I’m not a federal employee, but here’s my list:

  • Fed the spiders
  • Cleaned the spider cages
  • Fed the spiders again
  • Turned over the mealworm substrate
  • Repaired some spider silk frames

Those are probably the least significant, least time-consuming tasks I did last week, so I can fulfill the letter of the request while not informing them of anything important that I accomplished.

What baffles me, though, is that the US has roughly 3 million federal employees. What will they do with 3 million emails pouring in to Musk’s office? The link above has an idea: they’re just going to shovel them all into an AI as training data, and possibly to search for fireable statements.

Actually, the best kind of response is like this one, from the department of defense.

DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled “What did you do last week.”

That’s right. Just ignore the spam email.

I do wonder if Darin S. Selnick still has his job.

Here’s a different kind of reaction from a Democrat:

Good god, we have to get rid of these geriatric do-nothings in the Democratic party. By the way, Gerry Connolly was chosen by house democrats over AOC to chair the oversight committee.

This is why Democrats lose.

Get ready for the Resistance

Nature has noticed that the United States is destroying its research infrastructure. The Trump administration is blocking research grants by hook and crook.

bout a month after Donald Trump took office as the 47th US president, almost all grant-review meetings remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget.

These review panels are suspended because the Trump administration has barred the agency from taking a key procedural step necessary to schedule them. This has caused an indefinite lapse in funding and led scientists to make difficult decisions about the future of their research programmes.

The Trump administration issued an order on 27 January freezing payment on all federal grants and loans, but lawsuits challenging its legality were filed soon after, placing the order on hold. The fact that payments still aren’t going out because Trump’s team has halted grant-review meetings is exploiting a “loophole” in the process, says Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has had to reconsider hiring graduate students because of a frozen grant application. “It’s really quite nefarious.”

Getting a research grant has never been a process of pushing a button and the cash pops out. Writing grants is an arduous process, and after you submit it, the NIH brings in a large team of scientists from a relevant field to read them and review them and make comments and rate the proposal. It’s a big deal, and it’s not a process that can be bypassed. The trick they’re pulling is to prevent the NIH from scheduling review meetings, so the money is all bottled up. It’s devious and dishonest. Illegal, even.

Some legal scholars say this ‘backdoor’ approach to freezing funding is illegal. That’s because the US Constitution gives Congress, not the president or his team, the power to appropriate funds, says David Super, an administrative-law specialist at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC. Blocking “advisory-committee meetings that are legally required to make payments is no different in effect than simply refusing to sign contracts or issue checks”, he says.

My fellow Americans — we all remember those grade school civics classes, where we all learned about the tripartite division of powers, checks and balances, all that bullshit that Trump just ignores. Maybe we should try enforcing those principles?

How about marching on the state? Stand up for science!

March 7. We all need to get out there and make some noise. I can’t make it to the national event in DC, but there are local events all around the country, look up your nearest rally site. I’ll be in St Paul at noon that Friday!

Will I see you all there?

Am I one of the cool kids yet?

I had to go shopping to replace my sad, tired, old winter coat, and I got this.

I see that “Carhartt” logo all over stuff here in the midwest. Did it work? Am I fashionable now?

Oh no! I am not one of the cool kids. The neighbors next door (a house full of college kids) is warming up for something — probably a big party tonight — and are out on their deck and throwing firecrackers and woo-hooing. That’s fine, but I noticed what they’re wearing.

That’s from a company called GameBibs, and I guess that’s how students show school spirit nowadays, wearing overalls with stripes in the school colors. I looked over there and my first thought was that it must be National Clown Day, or something, but no. It’s just that I’m not cool. Not cool at all.

Physiognomy tells me this man is the village idiot

Niall Gooch is a very Christian man. He writes for the Spectator, a conservative British news weekly, but he also publishes in the Catholic Herald and in Premier Christianity. He must be a good Christian, right?

It’s amazing how much crime could be prevented by something as simple as a physiognomy check at the border.
Simple basic science, easily taught to everyone, we just refuse to use it.

Who needs evidence, trials, lawyers, and juries? Just break out the calipers.

But really, I haven’t seen anyone discussing physiognomy as an indicator of behavior in ages (I don’t read Quillette). OK, though, if it’s a simple science (not that Niall Gooch has any knowledge of science) and anyone can do it, let’s try it.

This is Niall Gooch.

Diagnosis, anyone?

I’m going to say…gormless dweeb, not very bright but with a lot of unfounded confidence, not to be trusted with information or the dissemination thereof, shouldn’t be allowed outside the border of a small village.

Honest, I inferred that entirely from his face, not all from the stupidity of what he writes.

The US has always had an anti-science core, anyway

Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.

I will never be nice to MAGA

Increasingly, I’m seeing stories about how Trump’s policies are going to actually hurt the people who voted for him.

I don’t care. We’re all feeling the pain now, and it’s not going to end soon, and it’s going to get worse. These people who voted for him deserve all the pain they experience, and I’m all for making them miserable about it for the rest of their lives. It looks like Rebecca Watson feels the same way.

I won’t forgive them. Every day of this horrific administration does greater damage to the country.

Did you know Trump is going to take over the US Postal Service? You know, the service many Americans use to vote? It’s going to be a wasteland here.