I ☠️ flat-earthers

I refuse to watch this new Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve, because even if it is ripping ruthlessly into those idjits, it’s giving them more attention than they deserve. They’re also intellectually dishonest.

One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn’t actually rotate.

Except… It does.

“What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift,” Knodel explains. “A 15-degree per hour drift.

“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem.’

“We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”

You know what they say: If your experiment proves you wrong, just disregard the results!

“We don’t want to blow this, you know?” Knodel then says to another Flat Earther. “When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.

“If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad.

“What I just told you was confidential.”

Wow. They spent $20,000 on an instrument that they then chose to ignore. As one of those small college scientists who is trying to patch together gear on little bitty $400, $600 grants, and who bought a microscope camera for $2000 out of his own pocket, I’m more than a little appalled. Next time someone decides to drop a chunk of money on some crackpot, could they just send it to me, instead? I’ll use it responsibly.

If nothing else, that kind of money would fund summer research projects for at least six students, and would help produce competent scientists for the future.

The world will be a better place when Rupert Murdoch dies

Jane Mayer’s thorough article on the entanglement of Fox News with Trump is a depressing exposé, but not a surprising one. The airheads on Fox are shaping government policy.

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Axios recently reported that sixty per cent of Trump’s day is spent in unstructured “executive time,” much of it filled by television. Charlie Black, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose former firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, advised Trump in the eighties and nineties, told me, “Trump gets up and watches ‘Fox & Friends’ and thinks these are his friends. He thinks anything on Fox is friendly. But the problem is he gets unvetted ideas.” Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

It’s all a big joke. These people at Fox are corrupt, incompetent, rat-fucking idiots. For example, look at how they do “research”.

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.

Remember the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that regulated the media and required them to be honest and balanced, and that was thrown out by the Reagan administration? Bring it back. Its absence is what has allowed Fox to flourish.

Jeez, but Murdoch has been a malignant influence on the world. I’ll be partying when he kicks the bucket.

I’ve always liked Emma Thompson

Fine actor. Socially conscious human being. What’s not to like? And now she has signed on to a letter rejecting TERF attitudes.

However this letter takes aim at the “harmful argument” that women’s rights are threatened by trans equality, with the letter’s signatories stating that: “Trans people have played an integral role in every civil rights movement to date; from LGBT equality to women’s causes.

“Attempts to airbrush trans people from conversations regarding equality and human rights, or to exclude them from advancements for LGBT and women’s rights, have happened before.

“Such efforts may have re-energised, but they are nothing new, and we say as a collective of women: they are not representative of us. We support trans rights.”

The letter’s author, Rhiannon Spear, goes on:

“As a woman and a proud feminist, I know that advancing trans rights does not threaten my womanhood or my feminism. That stance is not only shared by this letter’s co-signatories; but by many women’s support services, networks, organisations and centres across the country – who have a long history and solid record of standing up for women.

“Defining womanhood by conforming to strict biological and physical attributes has been fought against by strong women long before my time. To now see some advocate that trans women are denied their rights and their dignity on these very grounds, I believe would be a devastating step back for women and for feminism.”

Meanwhile, I check into YouTube this morning, and there’s Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) arguing that women have a biological imperative to reproduce, and any woman who can’t have babies isn’t a real woman with a purpose in society, so that he can complain about the existence of trans women.

Batman doesn’t smile enough

It’s true. Read the comics, watch the multitude of movies about him, and Batman almost never smiles. He’s grim. He’s all dressed in dark clothes. He tries to instill fear in his foes.

Apparently, that just wouldn’t work if he were Batwoman. She’d be told to smile all the time.

It’s ridiculous, but that’s the latest controversy over the upcoming Captain Marvel movie — she’s a serious superhero who doesn’t smile enough.

Look at that. Maybe he’d find out where he is if he smiled more, or offered the snitch some cookies.

Now look at this Captain Marvel person. Terrifying.

Don’t get me started on that Wonder Woman movie. She seems to take the whole World War I scenario way too seriously. No wonder that movie totally bombed.

Atheist “comedians” joining the ranks of conservative “comedians” — not so funny any more

There is a new Contrapoints video, and it’s about comedy, as you can tell from the title, “The Darkness”. I think there were some insightful ideas in there, in particular the argument that edgy humor comes from exploring ones own place of darkness with familiarity and detail, and that one way that “edgy” comics fail is that they try to describe someone else’s darkness, while being completely unfamiliar with the terrain. She uses as an example Ricky Gervais, who made a Netflix comedy special where the opening was about mocking trans people. He identifies as a chimp rather than an attack helicopter, and there — I’ve just revealed the sole scrap of originality and creativity in the whole routine.

It’s a good point, and a different way of looking at the whole “punching up” vs. “punching down” distinction. In part the problem is comedians who babble on promoting their audiences’ prejudices rather than using humor to expose a truth.

Anyway, she also briefly expresses scorn at the privileged, white, atheist male comedian who can’t even see the place of pain they are invested in scoring points against. Ricky Gervais is a great example — there’s a loud and proud atheist who has become a terrible scab marring the movement. I thought of another example, too: a prominent cringe-beast whose flaws were obvious from the very beginning. I speak of Bill Maher, the unwatchable one, the Friday night affliction on HBO. And just by coincidence, I ran across an entertaining criticism of Maher.

Bill Maher, like Kevin Smith movies, was a vice that I could excuse in my teens and 20s but now seems extremely dated, disconcertingly bro-ish, and just all-around embarrassing. As Maher himself would surely explain, in a gratingly patronizing tone, the whole point of Politically Incorrect was to push the envelope. Though much of the time the show was actually pretty tame, unless you consider Carrot Top and Tom Arnold making jokes about home-schooled kids to be the height of edgy television. But there were other moments from Politically Incorrect that remain genuinely provocative, and not in a good way — like when Maher explained to a black woman that the n-word was acceptable for white people to use because you hear it so much in rap songs. Now there’s an argument you could imagine Rush Limbaugh making today.

When you watch that clip, it seems clear that Maher was always a jerk, rather than evolving into a jerk later on. Now I’m wondering, was he ever funny? As a stand-up comic, Maher is generally respected as a legacy act. But on Real Time, he can be painfully, excruciatingly unfunny. Maher might want to believe that people object to his jokes because they’re social justice warriors who can’t take a shot of unvarnished truth. But the actual substance of his humor doesn’t support that belief.

There are still some great atheist comedians out there — George Carlin was mostly hilarious, Eddie Izzard is still worth listening to. But I think we’re beginning to see the genre eroding into the Dennis Miller swamp.

Related:

How do you quantify “artistic standards” like that?

So much missing the point

I like this little comic.

Don’t read the comments though, unless you like to watch target shooting where everyone misses. Lots of people nitpicking and arguing that “But Movie X was a bad movie” — which doesn’t matter. Most of the stuff churned out by Hollywood is objectively bad, a lot of bad movies may be subjectively enjoyable, and the point of this comic is that the gatekeepers who want to tell you what you should like should be ignored. Like what you like, let other people like what they like.

I feel for my students now

Today was the day I set for myself to complete all the online coursework required to qualify for IRB certification, since I’m concerned that some of my proposed spider research might require approval. The fact that the work is on spiders isn’t a problem (it was weird discovering that invertebrates don’t seem to count as “animals”), but that I’m planning to survey people’s — you know, human beings’ — homes might be of some concern. I’m dotting those i’s and crossing those t’s to make sure.

Anyway, I hadn’t realized what a painful slog it was going to be. Lots of the modules have these little staged videos illustrating cases of problematic behavior. I’ve already decided that I hate Smarmy Grad Student and Smug PI so much. I have to take a little quiz after each module, too, which are usually easy, but the ones on financial reporting put me to sleep, and jeez, I had to take an online cours in Export Controls and Economic Sanctions which was 90% acronyms, I think. For instance, my work has to comply with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which is going to put a real crimp into my nefarious plans for spiders.

Now it’s done, at least, and my brain is only bleeding a little bit.

Did you expect brand loyalty from a spider?

No one is surprised, instead all the arachnologists are thinking “Cool!” Scientists in the Amazon captured a video of a mygalomorph spider chowing down on a young mammal. Mygalomorphs (tarantulas, funnel web spiders, trap door spiders) are big arthropods that will kill and eat anything about their size that they can ambush, so they’ll eat other arthropods, small birds, reptiles, and yes, mammals.

You probably shouldn’t eat ET

Charlie Jane Anders says that if we meet intelligent Space Aliens, we’d probably try to eat them (and we shouldn’t). I agree, because people are horrible, but I also think we shouldn’t because at the least we’re going to get Space Diarrhea, but we’re probably just going to get Space Death.

Anyway, I made a video. Unfortunately, I didn’t script it, but just charged off extemporaneously, which means it ended up about an hour long. Sorry. College professor. Wind me up, I talk for an hour about anything.

The summary: earth life maintains mutual compatibility (more or less) because of its common origin, 4 billion years of co-evolution, and because specialization and cooperation maximizes efficient extraction of resources. Aliens have none of that, and are quite likely to have diverged biochemically in ways that are inherently inimical to our biochemistry, and we have not had any opportunity to adapt to their differences. I also suggest that one hypothesis to explain the so-called Fermi Paradox is that habitable worlds evolve such different detailed chemistries that they are basically tainted toxic soups to other species, and that any sensible starfaring species would flag stellar systems with living biospheres with a great big biohazard symbol. Mars-like worlds which lack any native life (presumably) but are terraformable might be the optimal target for human colonization.