Anyone want to debate a creationist in Minnesota?

I got a phone call from Eric Hovind — he’s looking for someone to debate John Sanford and Danny Faulkner someplace in Minnesota next October. I turned him down flat.

Even if, in your worldview, you think you’ll make fools of them?

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re already fools.”

And that was that. Although he did ask if I’d ask around and see if anyone was interested in taking my place.

OK, so I’m asking around. I don’t recommend anyone taking him up on the offer, but if you must, contact me and I can let Hovind know how to get in touch with you.

That’s a bad joke, I will never forgive myself

Over on the Patreon site, I posted a photo of a proud spider mama and her freshly laid egg sac, and I called her Parentsteatoda tepidariorum, rather than Parasteatoda tepidariorum, because that’s how degraded my sense of humor has become over the last few days.

Slap me. Slap me hard, I deserve it.

What do you get when you cross a dad joke with a scientist joke? You get me. I’m so ashamed.

No plan survives contact with the enemy (or students)

When I first heard that we were going to switch to online classes, my first thought was that this will be a lot of work, but it’ll be easy, mindless work: I’ll just lift everything I do in class and plop it down on the intertubes, and I’ll send stuff home with the students so they can do their lab work there. Straightforward. A nuisance, but no, I don’t need to change my approach at all.

That lasted about 24 hours, and then I took the radical step of talking to my students. First casualty: nope, no way am I going to raise flies in my house.

Then I learned that some of my students get online routinely…but through their phone or campus computer labs. I’m sitting here in my home office with two big monitors and a fast internet connection, they might be only getting online intermittently and peering at it through a tiny screen. Whoops, no big productions of my hour-long lectures. No required online sessions.

So, today, I rethink and refocus. I’m going back to the syllabus and figuring out exactly what concepts I have to get across to the students to prepare them for the next course in the curriculum (for introductory biology) or grad school/professional life/existence as an informed citizen (for genetics). I have to deliver those concepts to the student who has minimal internet access.

That means — oh no — I have to rely much, much more on the textbook. I have to be the guide, rather than the source, of the information. I can’t expect the students to absorb knowledge on a schedule, but instead, have to point them to information and tell them what my expectations are, and give them the freedom to meet them on a flexible schedule.

It’s a lot of compromises and not entirely satisfactory, and I look forward to someday returning to the normal world where students and I actually see and interact with each other in person. Until then, though, I have to make sure the goals of my courses are reached, somehow.

Uh-oh. I just glanced at Right Wing Watch

I do believe in monsters. Except they’re all human, and mostly religious.

I can’t recommend it. Not that it isn’t honestly reporting what the Right is doing, but that it’s more terrifying than I can take. A small sampling:

Paranoia, conspiracies, End Times lunacy, QAnon garbage, it’s all there. The Left is accused of hysteria and overreaction when sensible and necessary action is taken to control the pandemic, but these looneytunes are taking it all to a new level. I’m waiting for the parade of flagellants and the right-wing coup in the midst of the chaos now.

If you want nightmares, watch creepy Kenneth Copeland curing everyone through their television screens.

What’s all over his hand? Ewww.

It’s almost a relief to turn to Answers in Genesis, where they just have a glitter in their eye and see the coronavirus as a mere opportunity to proselytize.

I’m convinced that this coronavirus outbreak is possibly the greatest outreach opportunity for the church worldwide. The coronavirus has covered the globe and, thus, brought missions to our own turf. The church needs to respond to the current situation sensibly and centered around the gospel. Here are some things we should be doing during this time of worldwide panic.

The “things” are to assemble a medical mission team (evangelize while treating people), buy up all the personal hygiene products from your local stores to bribe the local community, and write up Bible tracts to be distributed with your bottles of hand-sanitizers.

It’s horrible, exploitive, and ghoulish behavior, exactly what I expect from Christians any more, but it’s also almost quaint against the backdrop of the outright dangerous nonsense other groups are promoting.

So this is how civilizations die. I’d rather not be in the middle of it.

The realistic perspective

My university has closed all face-to-face classes until 1 April, when, I presume, they’ll reassess what should be done. I hope no one thinks everything will be over then, because it won’t be. We’re just getting started. I expect April is when the pandemic in the US will be just roaring into action.

Some experts agree.

40-70% of the US population will be infected over the next 12-18 months. After that level you can start to get herd immunity. Unlike flu this is entirely novel to humans, so there is no latent immunity in the global population.
[We used their numbers to work out a guesstimate of deaths— indicating about 1.5 million Americans may die. The panelists did not disagree with our estimate. This compares to seasonal flu’s average of 50K Americans per year. Assume 50% of US population, that’s 160M people infected. With 1% mortality rate that’s 1.6M Americans die over the next 12-18 months.]
The fatality rate is in the range of 10X flu.
This assumes no drug is found effective and made available.
The death rate varies hugely by age. Over age 80 the mortality rate could be 10-15%.
Don’t know whether COVID-19 is seasonal but if is and subsides over the summer, it is likely to roar back in fall as the 1918 flu did

There is no guarantee that this will be a replay of the 1918 pandemic, but we should prepare as if it is. I’m teaching cell biology in the fall, I’m going to spend the summer getting organized for possibly having to teach it online.

I hope that’s all I have to do, and we’re not going to end up preparing by digging trenches for mass graves.

This next recommendation is personally bothersome. My wife flew to Colorado before the extent of the crisis became unavoidably obvious. She was supposed to fly back next week. Flying is out of the question anymore, so we’ve been trying to come up with alternative methods of getting her back home.

We would say “Anyone over 60 stay at home unless it’s critical”. CDC toyed with idea of saying anyone over 60 not travel on commercial airlines.

Right now we’re considering that instead maybe she should stay in Boulder with my daughter for some indefinite period of time. Safety apart is smarter than travel together that maximizes our chance of infection.

Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment

He has a remarkable ability to infest, corrupt, and destroy even the most reputable institutions. Will you ever believe a doctor’s report on the health of a president ever again? Do you still wishfully hope that Mr Smith Goes to Washington accurately portrays how an honest man can shape the Senate? Do you believe any more that “CDC” stands for “Center for Disease Control”?

Of course, he had help. It would be nice if the poison in the body politic had a single name and we could just boot the creep and get back to having trust, but I just can’t get out of my head the fact that 43% of the electorate think he’s doing a good job coping with a medical crisis.

Nerdy nostalgia

OK, I’ve got to put up something light just to relieve my stress. Years ago, long before video games, before Dungeons & Dragons, what did stereotypical young male nerds do? One acceptable answer would be model railroading — there was a gigantic subculture of that — but I was poor and living in a family with six kids, so there was no space for the layouts. The other answer would be building model kits.

You might not know it from my current suave air, but there was a time between 12 and 18 years of age when I was building and painting all kinds of models: model planes, model rockets, model movie monsters, all that stuff. I also branched into balsa wood models in high school. I had these things hanging from my bedroom ceiling, on my dresser, on the floor. Because of the aforementioned lack of space, I did a lot of the crafting in my grandparents’ attic, which had the dual benefit of a large amount of storage room, and that my grandmother would come up every once in a while with cookies and milk.

So it was nice to stumble across this video summary of the various model companies that dominated the 60s and 70s. I swear, I recognized half the models shown and remembered building them.

You might ask what happened to my vast cluttered collection after high school. I abandoned them. They were left piled up in my grandmother’s attic, and then she died while I was living far, far away, and the house was sold and the old memorabilia had to be cleared away, and some of my relatives asked if they could blow them up with firecrackers and set them on fire. I said yes. Sometimes you just have to let go of childish things.

I do wish they’d at least made video recordings of the carnage. Those big old balsa models in particular would have been spectacular in their fiery demise.

This is my life for a while, isn’t it?

I just got out of class, which was part explaining science, and part negotiating how we’re going to continue from here to the end of the semester. The students had questions, I have questions, and we have relatively few answers.

Next up, I’m coordinating a biology faculty meeting which may get eaten up with addressing the multiple questions we’re going to have about how to suddenly switch to teaching online. We’ll have questions, I hope we have some answers.

Then I’m teaching a lab, which will be very short, because I’m just going to abort the experiment we were about to start and tell them we’re going to switch to me doing online demos and getting results, which they’ll have to analyze and interpret.

Finally, I’m just going to lie down. I didn’t get much sleep last night, trying to figure out how I’m going to have to revamp everything in both my classes. I expect I’ll be spending spring break trying to cope with this headache.

Nothing makes sense any more

I did it. I watched Trump’s address last night. It was painful. Somebody told him he couldn’t mug for the camera and that he had to hold still and not rant, but only read from the teleprompter, a completely unnatural behavior for him, and it showed. What’s with all the loud sniffing? All the speech did was highlight the unsuitability of this man for a crisis. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nothing he’s saying makes sense, except as an incoherent reaction to a problem that motivates him to reach out and help…his fellow rich people. We keep getting whipsawed by inconsistent policy decisions.

Makes sense:

  • Much as I hate it, shutting down face-to-face interaction at our university is a smart move. We have to slow this pandemic down.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Closing down universities, while still allowing massive sporting events to go on. Tens of thousands of people, shoulder to shoulder, eating hot dogs and drinking beer?
  • Megachurches holding massive services. Jesus won’t help you.

Makes sense:

  • The NBA suspending all games.

Makes sense:

  • Putting scientists and doctors to work to come up with sensible policies.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Trump waiting for Jared Kushner to make a decision about the virus.
  • Cutting funding to the CDC and NIH.
  • $50 billion in loans to small businesses, and cutting taxes.

Makes sense:

  • Coordinating internationally to prevent the spread of the disease.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Banning travel from Europe. Just Europe, not Asia. Later amended to exclude the UK from the ban.
  • Calling this a “foreign virus”. Viruses don’t have nationalities.

Makes sense:

  • Universal free healthcare.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • Relying on the charity of insurance companies.

Makes sense:

  • 54% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s overall performance.

Doesn’t make sense:

  • 43% approve of how he’s handling the pandemic! Only 49% disapprove.

The president’s address was preceded by this phenomenon, which was perfectly representative of how America works.

And on that note, I have to go work with students who I may be seeing personally for the last time to figure out how we’re going to finish up this semester.