If schadenfreude were a panacea, we could all go back to work

Unfortunately, watching the frantic back-pedaling and sudden about face of loud conservatives is only good for entertainment value.

After mocking the coronavirus panic, Jerry Falwell Jr. has closed Liberty University.

Paula White, the venal “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, used a prayer meeting to beg for cash, and plugged a big evangelical event that would have “spiritual protections” against the coronavirus. The event has since been cancelled.

The Museum of the Bible spent a lot of money looting artifacts from the Middle East illegally. Now it’s been discovered that many of them are fakes.

After doing their best to downplay the pandemic, Fox News is now changing their tune and pretending they knew it all along.

It’s a sick sad world when we are watching everything crash and burn but can take some pleasure in seeing the assholes in flames, too.

My agenda for the Great Isolation

OK, world, buckling down. It’s time to get a whole lot of course development done in a few days. This is supposed to be my vacation, why am I looking at a scary pile of work?

  1. I have to spell out the new course routine for my students. What that is going to be is:
    • New course video at the start of each week. This will be delivered as both video and as a text script for bandwidth-limited students. The goal is to clearly spell out the concept they must understand that week, and give pointers to textbook material that covers the subject. These will be short, 15-20 minutes.

    • The syllabus is going out the window. There will be less testing, and more regular assignments. These assignments will also be given at the start of the week, and will be due a week later — I’m going to try to accommodate the new demands on our students’ time, so we all have to be flexible.

    • Exams will all be open book, open notes, open internet essay exams. This could be wonderful, or it could be painful. We’ll see.

    • Our regularly scheduled class meeting times will now be used as optional office hours via Zoom. I’ll just be hanging out in front of a camera with a whiteboard.

    • You can’t do Zoom at home? Fine, I’ll be giving out my email (they’ve already got that) and my cell phone number. I’ll be accessible, I hope they are.

  2. My first video and text page will be #1, above. I’ll be working on that for both my classes today.

  3. My second video and text will be a recap of the semester to date, with explicit references to the textbook and the battery of pdf files already on Canvas. With this abrupt shift in narrative style I have to at least nod in the direction of continuity. I should have that done by the end of the week.

  4. Then, over the weekend, I have to assemble the first new videos+text. In my introductory biology course, we’ve just begun the basic genetics section, so this will be an overview of Mendelian problem solving; in Genetics, this will be an introduction linkage and linkage mapping. (Whenever I teach these two together, this is always a problem: I have to simultaneously teach a gentle review of the basics to first year students, and a full-on mathy in-depth deep dive to the seniors. I have nightmares about mixing them up.)

  5. I still have to work around the details of the online lab — the announcement of new restrictions on using the facilities on campus is making that a little tricky. I have homozygous flies growing in an incubator right now. The plan is next week to set up the parental reciprocal cross, photographing the phenotypes and putting those online. A little more than a week later, I’ll photograph representative F1 flies — the two crosses should produce different results, which will be presented without explanation — and set up the F1 cross. Maybe two weeks after that, I should have swarms of F2 flies, which I alone will have to sit down and score, for hours and hours (usually I can just crack the whip and have a legion of undergrads do the tedious work). I’ll post the numbers of each phenotype, again with little comment, and then the students will have to get to work interpreting the data and writing up a lab report describing what I did and what it means. They should have the background to understand what’s going on, since I described sex linkage last week and will be giving them all the logic of linkage next week, so it’s going to be more like a science puzzle they have to put together.

  6. I also have to unwind, so I’m also planning a little social hullabaloo on Wednesday evening with friends on YouTube. Maybe I’ll watch something on Netflix later, or read a book. I was going to use this week to get a draft of a paper together, but that’s another thing that’s going to be thrown out the window, to avoid burnout. Maybe next week, when I’ve settled into a new routine.

That’s my life for the next 6-8 weeks, at which time all the upheaval will be totally over and the sun will be shining and the birds will be singing and my wife will show up at my door and the spiders will be flourishing and the Revolution will be in full swing and we’ll all have happy normal things to do.

There’s ordinary evil, and then there’s greedy, grasping, gratuitous evil

We’re going to have to work on our categories, I see. This one is a mess about profiteering, lawyers who serve greed rather than justice, and an astonishingly selfish view of a pandemic as an opportunity to exploit everyone. Patent trolls are trying to block companies that make COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It’s a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you’ll ever see. They are representing “Labrador Diagnostics LLC” a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you’ll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos — the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.

However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?

So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, “Labrador Diagnostics,” which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.

This is shaking up my perspective — I thought conservatives were the apotheosis of evil and Satan incarnate, but these guys seem even worse. Irell & Manella are American lawyers based in Los Angeles, so the only hope for my equanimity is that they’re also Republicans.

They’re trying to snatch all of my joy away!

We’ve been sent a letter from our university president. As of Wednesday, 18 March, everything is shutdown. How’s this for a thorough expulsion?

As I communicated this weekend, I expect all employees to work from home by no later than Wednesday, March 18. This is not optional for faculty and staff at all levels of the organization systemwide, and I expect supervisors to honor this decision.

Not optional. This isn’t a choice for a lot of faculty who maintain live animal labs. Or the greenhouse. Or anything that requires regular maintenance.

A little further, it links to more details for us slaves to other organisms.

Each lab should develop a list of essential operations to continue ongoing experiments and research that would suffer a major impact if temporarily discontinued, such as loss of years of effort, data, or loss of a major investment. Work that maintains essential equipment and safe standby mode in labs or maintains essential samples and animal populations also meets the criteria for essential operations.

Other laboratory research is to be discontinued. The only expansion of research that is allowable during this time is research related to the COVID-19 virus.

Examples of essential operations for projects unrelated to COVID-19 include (but are not limited to): 1) maintaining liquid nitrogen levels in storage tanks, 2) maintaining ongoing animal experiments where stopping the experiment would compromise the project, 3) feeding and caring for animals, 4) maintaining critical cell cultures, and 5) processing specimens for those clinical trials that will remain open during this period.

So I’m supposed to continue all research? If I go in to throw flies at spiders, I can’t even spend an hour or two on the microscope? I really work solo most of the school year, and have a few students — if I’m lucky — in the summer.

So right now I have no family, no students, I have to do all my teaching through a computer screen, and everything is frozen outside so I can’t go spider hunting, and now they tell me I can’t even work alone in my lab? I’m just to be trapped inside my big empty house with an evil cat all day, every day? I might snap. Mary will eventually come home to a gibbering madman. Well, more gibbering and more mad than usual.

Hmm. I could bring the spider cages home, and an incubator, and at least my dissecting scope. Then Mary could come home to less gibbering, but a house full of spiders and lab gear instead.

Sacrifices. We all must make sacrifices.

Aww, heck. If Idris Elba has been diagnosed and is staying home, I have to buck up and hang on here, too.

I haven’t been tested, and can’t be — we still have too few testing kits.

On the other hand, does Idris Elba have a colony of spiders he has to take care of? I think not.

In other dismal news…

I just learned in their newsletter that the American Arachnology Society meetings are cancelled this year. Aw, darn — I was looking forward to that. The thing is, too, that they were scheduled to take place in early July, at UC Davis, so this is right now the most proactive cancellation I’ve encountered yet. Meanwhile, my university is pretending we’ll be back in business in 2½ weeks, which is rather absurdly optimistic. The other con I regularly attend in the summer is Convergence, around the end of August. There aren’t any whispers about cancelling that, at least not yet.

The AAS newsletter also has a nice article on teaching kids to be comfortable with spiders, so that’s a plus.

I think I’ll be spending the whole summer right here in Stevens County.

I throw a terrible party

I decided that the only way I could celebrate my anniversary this year was to take care of Mary’s birds, so I scattered some popcorn out in the yard, put up some fresh suet, and hung some strange log of pig fat and seeds that I got at the store. They were not fooled. Mary’s not here, so they knew better than to come around to some crotchety old man’s idea of a party. It was a flop. All very high school, to be rejected.

I stood around outside for a while, and finally some bird came by, spurned all the new stuff I’d put up, and just went for the old suet Mary hung up before she left. I guess it tasted better.

There weren’t even any spiders to cheer me up. It’s still too cold, and we had some freezing drizzle this morning. There’ll be no springtime until my beloved returns.

Why does Dennis Prager still have a Twitter and YouTube account?

I keep hearing that the various social media services were going to start cracking down on disinformation. If that’s the case, why is Dennis Prager still around? His latest “fireside chat” is just an old ignorant man sitting around lying about the coronavirus.

It’s both sad and horrible. I lasted about ten minutes, roughly half of which is Prager talking about his dog. In the remainder, he made 3 stupid points.

  1. He’s a rational person and he hates irrationality, and those libs are all panicking and closing schools. He can’t stand panic.

    The thing is, though, nobody is panicking. Saying they are is about as convincing as saying you’re rational on your god-soaked propaganda channel. My university is closed, but no one was in a panic; this was a calmly made, rational decision based on the best available evidence. In centers of the epidemic, medical services are overwhelmed and people are dying, and since we aren’t particularly keen on seeing our students die, or bringing an infectious disease home to their more fragile grandparents, we decided to do the reasonable, responsible thing and minimize contact.
    Carl Zimmer posted some vivid data that illustrates why a timely response is necessary. In this graph of cumulative cases in Italy, Lodi was hit first and quickly shut down the city; Bergamo had its first case shortly afterwards, and waited two weeks before shutting down. Now the difference is dramatic. Bergamo has a rising number of cases, while Lodi effectively flattened the curve.

    2. Carl Zimmer: Here is a new, real-world demonstration of how social distancing and other measures can flatten the Covid-19 curve. The city of Lodi had the first Covid-19 case in Italy, and implemented a shutdown on Feb 23. Bergamo waited until March 8. From Oxford University, https://osf.io/fd4rh/?view_only=c2f00dfe3677493faa421fc2ea38e295

    That’s the kind of data officials looked at before making a calm decision. There was no panic. Prager is lying and misrepresenting the situation.

  2. The kids are only lightly affected, so why shut down schools? Yeah, that’s the kind of dumb-ass thing a Prager would say. Young people are less severely affected (but they aren’t immune — there have been deaths at all ages, just many more in older people), but they can carry and communicate the disease. The concern is that children will mill around with each other at school, come home, and next thing you know, white-haired avuncular 71 year old grandpa with the nice dog he loves so much is in the hospital with respiratory failure. And so are all the other older people in his family, and there aren’t enough respirators to go around, and the health care workers are all falling sick and told not to come in, and people are dying because little Billy gave pop-pop an affectionate kiss on the cheek.

    You deserve it, you lying fuck, but it’s not fair to put that guilt on Billy’s shoulders.

  3. Tens of thousands of people die of the regular flu everywhere without panicking. I might panic if I or my wife came down with the regular flu. But instead what we do is the rational thing: we get our flu shot every year, we stay home if we’re sick, and if we’re feeling the symptoms, we don’t head out for crowds to shake hands and hug people. That’s something only an insensitive, uncaring asshole like Dennis Prager would do, which he proudly declares that he is doing.

    The difference is that we have vaccines for the influenza that minimize its effects, and keeps the load on hospitals to a manageable level. We do not have a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. We know that it is more severe in its effects than influenza, is going to have a higher death count, and spreads rapidly. In both cases, we are making a rational, non-panicked decision about how to respond.

    If you accidentally set a piece of paper on fire in your home, you calmly put it out. If you accidentally start a grease fire in the kitchen, the curtains and your sleeve are on fire, the smoke alarm is frantically beeping, you don’t walk away, pet the dog, and make a video about how you set a piece of paper on fire and how clever you were to pat it out, and all the fire trucks and the doctors treating the deep burns on your arm are over-reacting.

Prager has billionaires backing him, though, and he can be as stupid and dangerous as he wants, and YouTube will continue to take his money.

Let’s try that again

Yesterday, I tried to have a remote conversation with some smart people. There were problems.

The good news: Zoom performed smoothly and well. We could hear and see everyone, we had a pleasant discussion, and everything was saved nicely locally. That’s mainly what I need for working with students.

The bad news: The parallel display in a live YouTube stream did not come off at all well. The first sign of trouble was that YouTube ignored all my prior planning and set up, and at the last minute spawned a new video stream. I don’t know what happened there at all. Then this new stream showed everyone, but only included my audio. It was a total mess for viewers at home.

When it was all over, I just killed the planned live stream, deleted the recording with only my voice, and re-uploaded the video. Here it is:

I’m going to experiment today with some private videos to iron out the kinks, and then on Wednesday evening I’ll try again with a casual conversation with some wicked SJWs and Skepticon weirdos.

Forty years ago today

Today is our 40th wedding anniversary! Sadly, because of an accursed virus, we have to spend it 800 miles apart. Our relationship is strong, though, so we’ll abide.

I did flip through our old photos, though. Here’s one with my parents and her parents on our wedding day.

To grumble a bit…we’ve got all these ancient photos that I would nowadays immediately throw out. We just had a relative with a cheap kodak point-and-shoot wander about and snap pictures, and it shows — I take sharper, brighter photos of spiders than we’ve got of the early days of our marriage. Oh, well, it’s the life that matters, these pieces of paper will just end up in a landfill in a decade or two.

Now I just have to get her back home, but even that can wait. Better that she avoids the risk and stays healthy, and it’s also important that she not spread a virus on an 800 mile transit (we have no idea whether either of us have been infected, but it’s wisest to pretend we are. We don’t need to kill immunocompromised or elderly people so we can share a cupcake and a glass of ginger ale.)