I don’t know that I like being on the other side of the microscope

Nature puts an uncomfortable twist on our current situation: Millions of students are returning to US universities in a vast unplanned pandemic experiment. Gosh, I guess I am like a big flask of hot agar, fresh out of the autoclave and getting poured into petri dishes for the students to contaminate. Let’s see what grows, OK?

Bringing so many university students to crowded campuses is uniquely risky in the United States, which has seen the largest number of deaths to COVID-19 of any country and has active community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic. Other large countries with surging infection rates, such as India and Brazil, are not opening up campuses to the same degree.

According to the College Crisis Initiative, a research project at Davidson College in North Carolina, more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States will bring students back to campus in some form, with 45 operating “fully in person”, another 446 as “primarily in person”, and nearly 600 offering various combinations of online and in-person classes as of 7 August. But plans change daily, with many universities that boldly planned to hold in-person classes deciding at the last minute to switch to virtual versions.

Yay! We get to bear the brunt of American exceptionalism this time around! My university is one of the 600. Yesterday I had my first student write to me to say they won’t be able to attend our in-person lab because they’ve been exposed and are in a two-week quarantine period. I’m glad they’re responsible about it all, but what am I going to do if (when) more students drop out of the lab? I’m definitely not going to penalize anyone for not infecting me, but all of the plans in our great unplanned pandemic experiment are going to crumble fast.

oh god oh god oh god

Classes start tomorrow. I’m looking at my pile of notes and lecture material and plans and thinking, “I’ve got this,” like I do every year, but now I have to do everything over Zoom, which is a real monkey wrench in the proceedings, and I’ve got the specter of disease and death hovering overhead, and who knows, maybe a political coup coming up midsemester, with forces in government working to destroy my profession, and I have to sit through a great long division meeting this morning where we’ll all pretend everything is normal and hear administrators go “wah wah, wa-wa wah wah” because I won’t be able to parse what they’re saying, and I’m going to be trying to finish up my syllabus with Zoom acting as little more than a distraction interfering with getting my actual WORK done, and cops are killing people and other people are gasping out their life on respirators while I’m merely suffering acute anxiety as the world burns, but hey, the flames will get to me soon enough to bring sweet oblivion and no one will care because there are more important things than a story about an old guy’s heart exploding and brain liquifying in an isolated office in the middle of midwestern farmland, so now I’m wondering if my headphones will stopper up my ears enough to prevent the brain goo from dribbling out and making a mess on the carpet.

That’s my workday ahead. How’s yours?

#InverteFest is coming

This weekend! If you’re wondering what Invertefest is, it’s an excuse to crawl around and get on your knees and get dirty rummaging around your house and yard and the park, looking for all kinds of miscellaneous invertebrates. If you’re on the coast, get out to the beach! The whole point is just to notice all the bugs and spiders and jelly fish and worms and beetles and grubs and flies that surround you. The instructions:

  1. Find invertebrates. This can be in your basement, your yard, the local park, the beach, an alley or anywhere near where you live.
  2. Share observations. Share photos, videos or art of your discoveries on Twitter using the hashtag #invertefest.
  3. Interact. Search the #invertefest hashtag for tweets and share, comment and learn.
  4. Bonus – citizen science. To contribute your observations for science, upload your photos to iNaturalist.

Huh. I do all that all the time already. I guess I’ll just do it more this weekend.

Well, that was quick

UNC opened for in-person instruction just one week ago; they have announced now that they are switching to entirely online instruction.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the largest schools in the country to bring students to campus for in-person teaching, said Monday it will pivot to all-remote instruction for undergraduates after testing showed a pattern of rapid spread of the novel coronavirus.

Officials announced the abrupt change just a week after classes began at the 30,000-student state flagship university.

They said 177 cases of the dangerous pathogen had been confirmed among students, out of hundreds tested. Another 349 students were in quarantine, on and off campus, because of possible exposure to the virus, they said.

What kind of magical, miraculous prophet could have foreseen such an outcome?

I mean, even with that example right in front of our face, no one could possibly predict that all the other universities that are the process of opening up might anticipate a similar result.

I really hope none of those students comes down with a serious case of COVID-19 with long-term consequences. Is UNC prepared to handle the moral and economic effects of that?

Hey, is the University of Minnesota ready?

An appropriate response from the UNC student paper.

Morris is Panic City today

At least for me. The students are back and lurking in the dorms. I have a Zoom meeting with advisees today. Classes start on Wednesday. Everything is Officially No Fun for a while.

Besides the usual fretting over getting courses up and running, now we have the added fun of waiting for the first coronavirus case to show up, and seeing how the university deals with it. At least we have the advantage of seeing other universities’ experience. UNC, for instance, has been open for one week and already has four clusters of cases in student housing.

We’re really opening, huh?

Safety first

Since we’re doing a lot of scouting around on country roads nowadays, I decided our car needs a warning sticker.

I’m wondering if it’s enough — maybe I should get some roof-mounted flashing yellow lights?

Sam Harris won’t care

Recently, Harris was skewered in Salon, as he’s been skewered everywhere else — his Ezra Klein interview made his inadequacy obvious, and that weird exchange with Bruce Schneier in which he just waved away the words of an internationally known security expert so he could continue to support racial profiling exposed his racism. This story just sums up everything we already knew.

But over time, Harris withdrew from expressing his opinions through platforms designed to ensure a minimum level of intellectual integrity. He began blogging and then started an enormously popular podcast, his principal medium for the past seven years. He stopped publishing peer-reviewed research papers. He opted not to submit articles to media outlets that imposed some editorial control over what they publish. Instead, he created a small media empire that enabled him to say whatever he wants, whether or not the message is misleading, the claims are factually erroneous, the reasoning is fallacious and so on. In other words, he figured out a way to bypass intellectual accountability — to opine as much as he wants about topics he doesn’t understand without peer-review, editorial oversight or other quality-control measures.

Like Trump, Harris seems wholly uninterested in getting things right. He claims to care about intellectual honesty and good scholarship, yet he consistently spouts misinformation on his podcast that could easily be corrected if only he were to engage — sincerely, and in good faith — those who disagree with him (very often actual experts on the topics of racism, feminism, social justice and so on). Indeed, so far as I can tell, Harris has become one of the greatest sources of misinformation on social justice issues in the United States today. His contribution to scientific racism — his boosting the visibility of claims like Black people are almost certainly dumber than white people for genetic reasons — will no doubt be one of his greatest, and darkest, legacies.

There’s good news and bad news here, though. The bad news is that yes, he’s a terrible, shallow person with a large audience — he’s sharing a niche with Joe Rogan — who promotes bad information. The good news is that over the years he has retreated into his own personal safe space, a hug box for racists.

Years ago when we were both on the atheist conference circuit (on different tiers, he was the high-priced speaker who demanded a security detail, I was the guy who was happy to be there and didn’t charge a fee), he was annoyingly ubiquitous. You couldn’t escape him. He was at every con, he was in every atheist magazine, I’d turn around and there he’d be with a big guy in a dark suit and sunglasses, glowering.

But now he’s got his podcast and a dedicated fan base, and I haven’t seen him or read anything by him in ages. You have to make an effort to find him and listen to his words, and I don’t, so that’s nice. I picture him as an unpleasant cyst that has become encapsulated in fibrous connective tissue, still there and it still hurts when you poke at it, but at least it’s not oozing pus all over everything else anymore. We should probably get it removed surgically some day.

Oh, jeez, remember when every time you pointed out some racist, stupid thing Harris said, there’d be some slimy fan boy showing up in the comments to complain that you’d taken him out of context? Let’s hope those days are over.

I’ve been doing Instagram wrong

I can look at what I post that people like, and it’s discouraging. So I posted this photo of a spider and her two egg sacs a few days ago, and it has been rewarded with 16 ♥, which is about par for the course. Then late last night, I threw in this quick view of me and Mary standing in a grassy field and…111 ♥ already? What?

I guess everyone prefers pictures of Mary to spiders. I’m going to have to switch to taking nothing but photos of the Instagram model I married in order to become a rich and famous influencer.

Except she doesn’t like to be photographed. Oh well, back to the “trying desperately to make spiders a thing” grind.