Uh-oh. Drexel is going to get a shake-up

This is not supposed to be possible. How do you redirect grant funds to strip clubs?

The former chair of the Drexel University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering spent more than $96,000 on area strip clubs and sports bars, in addition to $89,000 on food and iTunes purchases, the district attorney’s office said in a statement.

A university audit showed the longtime professor, who spent nearly three decades at the school, made numerous, unapproved purchases between 2010 and 2017 that he tried to be reimbursed for through research grants, according to state prosecutors.

My grants have all had long, detailed breakdowns of the proposed budget; the awards are then salted away by the university under multiple accounts with designated purposes, like “salaries”, “equipment”, “supplies”; there is a university administrator who monitors everything. I don’t have a checkbook that accesses the accounts. When I want to use my money to buy something, I go through university purchasing, which can draw on the funds, and they buy it for me. Last year I got a new incubator, which was justified under my proposal, and then I realized I needed a second one, which was not, and had to write an explanation to the administrator explaining why I wanted to move funds from one category to another to purchase this equipment. When we had the HHMI grant, we were frequently juggling the budget — this category came in under budget, this one looks like it was going to be a bit over — and we’d have to contact the Howard Hughes institution to clear it.

So this guy had an engineering grant, and he was able to blithely shuffle money from it into entertainment expenses? Unspecified entertainment expenses, since he wasn’t going to be able to invoice a local strip club, and just redirected reimbursements straight into his pocket to the tune of $185,000?

Unreal. I predict that a horde of accountants are going to crack the whip over every department at Drexel, because this is the kind of sloppy management that gets grants yanked.

Oh, yeah, and that department chair has already been fired, and is probably going to jail.

Yet another example of Christians unable to make an honest argument

Oh lord. This looks awful. It’s Matt Dillahunty in a debate with some evangelical clown named Glen Scrivener, where he totally fumbles an easy question. “Are all human beings worthy of all provision and protection?” he’s asked, and he pauses for a long time, and finally answers, “I have no idea”. It’s intercut with somebody pretending to be an exasperated. Then they cut to him saying he doesn’t think humans have intrinsic value, the universe doesn’t care about human life, and then this bit where he doesn’t think a person sitting around and just consuming doesn’t add value, etc., etc., etc.

It’s not how I would have answered anything, but OK, I think he’s overanalyzing and trying way too hard to be logical, and some of this is just plain bad argumentation. I had to look at the source, though, to get the context. So I did. It was agony. Not so much because of Dillahunty — although he does say some bullshit about bothsiderism, and the damn thing is an hour and a half long — but because Scrivener is such a flaming idiot. Also, whoever made this abbreviated cut is grossly dishonest. The part of the debate it’s taken from is at an hour and five minutes in, and it’s spliced together from short fragments sliced out of the following half hour. This is the audio analog to the notorious creationist ellipsis, where they splice together sentence fragments scattered over a whole paragraph to cobble together something the opposite of what the author intended.

If you’re going to mock anything in that debate, a worthier target is Scrivener. Around 38 minutes in, for instance (and at other points scattered throughout), he starts babbling about how secular humanism is just Christianity Lite, or a little later that all other religions, except Christianity, are built around the principle of Survival of the Fittest, (which is a Herbert Spencerism, not intrinsic to the scientific understanding of evolution or even to any of the religions he’s misrepresenting). He’s also got this smug Christian Exceptionalism, saying that it is the only religion that is inclusive and preaches universality and brotherly love and all that stuff.

You have in Christ the fittest who is sacrificed for the survival of the weakest, and what you get birthed out of the Christian movement is a unique preference for the poor, the marginalized, the weak, the outsider, to draw them in. Such that…we include everyone, even our enemies, into the circle of our humanity.”
…
[Christianity] is founded on the god who became flesh, who became the weak one, in order to rise up again and bring us weak ones into his family, and he uniquely gives to the entire human race a dignity.

He also has this weird schtick where he gushes over his god who became a single human cell. All that in order to enable his blood sacrifice to redeem, somehow, everyone. He never thinks twice about the twisted logic, or the lack of evidence, for any of this.

But you know what’s really annoying? I was all ready to critique what seemed to be a weakness in Dillahunty’s argument, and then I discover that the only way that excerpt was able to bring it up was to cut out an hour of flamboyant, ridiculous bullshit from Scrivener, and then hack up Dillahunty’s response into micro-fragments, and intersperse it with an actor hamming it up. I am always ready to argue my disagreements with other atheists, but then the theists have to dishonestly butcher a discussion to make their point, whatever it is, and I lose all interest in the atheist and just want to point and laugh at the capering Christian twit in the room.

So yeah, I don’t care that Matt Dillahunty paused for a few seconds before answering a question in a debate, especially not when the Christian is spewing glib garbage the whole time.

The first Goop review is in!

Oh boy. Ars Technica got to see the first episodes of Gwyneth Paltrow’s series. Do you think they liked it?

In so many ways, the goop lab with Gwyneth Paltrow is exactly what you’d expect based on what we already know about the Goop brand. The series provides a platform for junk science, gibberish, and unproven health claims from snake-oil-salesmen guests. It’s a platform on which respected, trained medical experts are not considered the authorities on health and medical topics; where logic and critical thinking are enemies of open-mindedness; where anecdotes about undefined health improvements are considered evidence for specific medical treatment claims; where the subjective experiences of a few select individuals are equivalent to the results of randomized, controlled clinical trials; and where promoting unproven, potentially dangerous health claims is a means to empower women.

I think the conclusion is that it is truly dire.

What good are virgins in a developmental biology lab?

I’m back! I survived my trek to the lab! It wasn’t as bad as I made it sound — the wind is biting, and the snow is coming down sideways, but it’s fairly light so far — so, except for the wolves and the yeti that tried to block my path, it was a reasonably easy trip.

There were reasons I was eager to go in. I’ve been getting anxious, because I’ve got all these new generation spiders, and they’re all virgins because of the shortage of males. I need them to lay eggs! I’ve got new students who want to work with me this semester, and it’s hard to do developmental biology with a bunch of virginal female spiders not producing embryos for us.* That one pair mated yesterday was a promising start, so there were a few things I wanted to do.

  • See if Yara had produced an egg sac. She hadn’t, but there were signs that she was nesting, with some debris pulled up into her favorite corner (which makes me think she might be Parasteatoda tabulata, too.)
  • Make sure her current partner, Chad, hadn’t been eaten. He was fine.
  • Feed her some more, both to make her less likely to eat the male, but also to fuel a little more egg production. Mission accomplished.

Does she look plump to you? She does to me, a little bit. Also her abdomen is paler than it was yesterday, I think. Come on, mama!

*There are some behavioral experiments we could do, but really, development is where my brain is at. We’ll see what interests the students.

The madness is setting in

I keep looking outside and thinking, “It’s not too bad yet, I can probably make it to the lab and back”, so I may just make one quick trip outside of my shelter. Before I’m snowed in. To check on the spiders. It’s only about 150 meters. I could make it.

If you don’t hear from me again later this morning, send a search party.

Why Jonathan Chait always makes me twitch

I don’t read Chait enough to diagnose why I don’t care for him — his vaguely liberal views always make me too queasy to think hard enough about what he’s saying, which is a good warning sign. But Alex Pareene does read him carefully and gets specific about what’s annoying. It’s not just that he’s always complaining about “free speech” on campus and how colleges are starting to wise up to the conservative scam of booking controversial assholes, it’s that he always favors avoiding calling out the bad guys.

In the course of defending his piece on Twitter, he has effectively made it clear that he thinks it’s inappropriate to label any person or cause “white supremacist” unless the targets of the label have openly embraced it. He has suggested that a political tendency can’t be “white supremacist” without vocal anti-Semitism, which is silly in the American context—as Ali Gharib points out, Judah P. Benjamin, perhaps the most prominent Jewish politician in the country at that time, served in Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s cabinet. Chait has argued that Rep. Steve King, who has explicitly argued that “somebody else’s babies” pose a “demographic” threat to “our civilization,” is merely “edging closer” to white supremacy.

So I’m safe from criticism by Chait if I make Nazi salutes, advocate putting brown people into camps, sloganeer about white genocide, and quote The Bell Curve to say that some races are inferior, as long as I don’t say, “I’m a white supremacist”? Good to know. I wouldn’t want to get on Chait’s bad side.

Something that is well-known to people who’ve read Chait for years, but may not be apparent to those who just think of him as a standard-issue center-left pundit who is sort of clueless about race, is that he is engaged in a pretty specific political project: Ensuring that you and people like you don’t gain control of his party.

I say “you” because his conception of the left almost certainly includes you. He is not merely against Jill Stein voters and unreconstructed Trotskyites and Quaker pacifists. He means basically anyone to the left of Bill Clinton in 1996. If you support a less militaristic foreign policy, if you believe the Democratic Party should do more to dismantle structural racism and create a more equitable distribution of wealth, if you think Steve fucking King is a white supremacist, Chait is opposed to you nearly as staunchly as he is opposed to Paul Ryan.

I’m not one of those people who has read Chait for years, so it’s good to have that flaw pinned down in the dissecting tray for me. But is Pareene right? I want to see Chait’s own words. So he quotes him defending Joe Lieberman in 2006. Joe Lieberman! Jesus.

In the end, though, I can’t quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What’s holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.

This is Chaitism distilled: They may be right—about Joe Lieberman, about the Iraq War, about the racism of the conservative movement—but they are right for the wrong reasons, and we cannot let them gain a foothold.

Yeesh. At least now I can go back to not reading Jonathan Chait with a clear conscience.

Isolation, madness, death

The wind has begun to howl, and promises to rise. The temperatures are frigidly bitter. The first snowflakes are falling, and soon I’ll be trapped alone in my home. Alone…my wife is a thousand miles away, I’m the sole guardian of this lonely old wreck. She promises to return next week, but can you trust the airlines? I may be here forever, abandoned. Did I say alone? Not quite. There is a sullen black cat here, watching me. There is madness in her eyes. We shall be howling at each other before this is over.

Then I think, am I in a Robert Eggers film?

So I decided to watch The Lighthouse to find out. Yep, definitely. My situation could be the premise for Eggers’ next film. Fortunately, I loved it, so bring it on — one of the best films of the year.

It felt much like The Witch, moody and atmospheric, with a growing sense of dread. You know no one is getting out alive, and it’s going to be their own paranoia and fear that destroys them. Every character is flawed, and those flaws just expand in the vacuum of their isolation until they all crumble under the weight of madness. Everyone is saturated by their environment — in the case of The Lighthouse, everyone is wet and cold, and you can almost smell the sea salt coming off the screen. There is a hint of the supernatural, but you can never quite be sure whether it’s real, or if it’s insanity, the best kind of spooky.

Well, I’ve got to get back to staring down the cat, and the liquor is already running low. The movie also has great tips for dealing with that situation…turpentine & honey, hmmm? We’ll have to try that, just before one of us staggers off into the blizzard to meet…check back later to find out.

Hatches battened

It’s -22°C out there, and I decided to take a brisk walk to the grocery store to stock up on essential staples, since there’s a major winter storm on the way, hitting us around 8am tomorrow and escalating to a blizzard on Saturday. I grabbed some red beans and brown rice and garlic and coffee, so I can survive the weekend with all the essentials. I will not be leaving my house for any reason from this point on until Sunday: the cat and I will be hunkered down with the shutters and blinds closed and some warm blankets and hot beverages, and we are prepared for anything. I’ve got bread and cheese in case the power goes out, even.

I’m so prepared that I’m going to be disappointed if this one fizzles out.

Mainly, though, since classes start up again on Tuesday I’m going to use this time-out to get a leg up on Genetics and Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, the two courses that will probably eat me alive this semester.

A major award!

It’s indescribably beautiful!

It was a stunning prize notification to arrive in my email this morning. There’s even a press release!

Pharyngula has been selected for the 2020 Best of Morris Award in the Business Services category by the Morris Award Program.

Each year, the Morris Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community. These exceptional companies help make the Morris area a great place to live, work and play.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2020 Morris Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Morris Award Program and data provided by third parties.

Look at that! Finally appreciated by my local community…except there’s this little voice in my head wondering what “marketing” I’ve done, or how, as a “small business”, I have contributed to community service. What information did they gather? Aww, what the hell, it’s a Major Award! I should put it in my front window!

So I was going to claim my award, but there’s a little comment in my notice.

As an Award recipient, there is no membership requirement. We simply ask each award recipient to pay for the cost of their awards. The revenue generated by the Morris Award Program helps to pay for operational support, marketing and partnership programs in support of local businesses. Congratulations on your selection.

Oh. I can get a nice plaque for $150, or a crystal award for $200, or both for $229.

Gosh. My pride is slightly deflated.

Ferda! Also, Yara ♥ Chad

You’ve missed the spiders, haven’t you? I was away for a week, and only today had time to spend a long morning working with them. They’ve been growing; I fed them a lot before I left, and when I came back I found that almost all of them had molted.

I gave them all a lot of flies today, because we’ve got another of those blizzards coming in tomorrow, and I may not be able to make it into the lab for a few days.

One big problem is that I’m down to only two Parasteatoda males, and no males for Steatoda triangulosa. This happened last year, too — the males are so much more fragile and they die off more rapidly. I resolved to invest more effort in raising da boys so this wouldn’t happen, and I didn’t do enough, obviously. Next year! I’ll do better! Or if I get a nice clutch of eggs to hatch soon, I’ll segregate the males and females as early as possible and make sure they’re well fed and protected.

Which may happen…

This is Chad, the biggest male I’ve got. Look at those bulging palps at the front of his head!

Chad got his chance. I put him in the cage with Yara, and they hit it off immediately. Yara scuttled over to him, and there was a bout of touchy-feeling probing, legs everywhere, and then she presented her epigyne to him, and he scurried right in there with those masculine palps. No fighting! No running away! I have high hopes for this encounter.

Aww, isn’t that sweet? I’m leaving them together for the next few days to make sure, then Chad is going to be introduced to some other ladies around the lab.