Call to arms, Minnesota!

I got a letter from the Minnesota Science Teachers Association. It seems there is some skullduggery going on to undermine our state science standards, from the Minnesota Rural Education Association. Well, cool: I’m an educator in rural Minnesota, but I know nothing about the MREA. I’m sympathetic to the idea of an organization that opposes/complements those elitist tyrants of the Twin Cities <shakes fist eastwards>. So what does the MREA want?

Minnesota Science Teachers and Citizens:

Science education in Minnesota is at a crossroads. As the Science Standards Revision Committee works to produce a new set of state science standards, the Minnesota Rural Education Association (MREA) is going to the state legislature this session in an attempt to reword statute 120B.023 thereby diluting the quantity, quality and rigor of the state science graduation requirements. Their proposed wording to the statute would still require biology and either chemistry or physics, but would reduce the current third science credit to a set of electives that does not require that “all academic standards in science” be met. This essentially removes earth and space science standards as part of the graduation requirements already in state statute 120B.024 (4) (ii.) and would allow districts to choose what science standards they will or will not teach.

If we, as science educators and citizens, want our students to receive a balanced, comprehensive background in all science disciplines, i.e., be scientifically literate, it is essential that you act now.

Below are samples of letters/emails that can be reworded or used as is and sent to your state representative and state senator. (These letters are also attached as a Word doc to this message.) Your voice must be heard or our new state science standards will be reduced in rigor and merit. Hand-picking which benchmarks will be taught in our schools harms science education for all students. A strong response from science teachers and citizens will tell the Legislature that our students deserve the best science education possible.

Go to https://www.leg.state.mn.us/ to find the names and e-mail addresses for your state representative and senator.

Please e-mail your state representative and senator as soon as possible. Be sure to include “Don’t Cut Science Education Standards” in the subject line. Thank you for your continuing efforts to provide our students with a quality, comprehensive science education.

Shorter version: they want to change the standards to allow high school students to focus narrowly in meeting their science requirements, and also want to open school districts to allow them to decide what science to teach. The first part I’m already disinclined to support because public school educations are already general enough — I’d rather they get a solid overview of multiple disciplines, because I care more about a broad background than that students get to ignore geology or chemistry if they want. As for the second part…I don’t trust rural school districts that much. State standards are there to make it harder for schools to compromise.

But OK, let’s be fair. What does the MREA say about their own plan?

MREA Executive Director Fred Nolan encouraged the state to amend the benchmarks statute 120B.023 that states, “Schools must offer and students must achieve all benchmarks for an academic standard to satisfactorily complete that state standard” by adding that high school students must meet the benchmarks in biology, physics or chemistry, and one elective set of benchmarks from the following: physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences or engineering, or technology and the applications of science. Schools must offer at least two of these elective sets of benchmarks.

So currently, high school students should take biology, physics, and chemistry, and one of a defined set of electives. The MREA would like to change that to an or, and let the schools decide what the additional science elective ought to be. Why? They don’t do a good job of justifying the change.

Minnesota faces a well-documented skilled-worker shortage and Minnesota Academic Standards currently hold high schools back from providing the education and training needed to effectively prepare students for their future jobs. Today’s system operates on a one-size fits all approach for students no matter their plans after graduation.

Ugh. Education as a purely vocational enterprise. No, thank you. I have a lot of respect for good vocational training, but that’s not what public school should be about — it should be about giving citizens a broad, basic background knowledge so that they’re better informed, and know better what they want to do with their life after schooling. No matter their plans after graduation, students should have at least a rudimentary understanding of science (and art, and history, and language, etc.) Focusing on JOBS is counterproductive.

I also find it weird that they say they’re concerned about a skilled worker shortage, and their solution is … to teach less science? Strange. I think there must be other motives they aren’t talking about.

The MnSTA provides some sample letters for Minnesotans to use if you want to write to your rep. I’ll include them below the fold.

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Piers Morgan. Can he get any more repulsive?

That’s a challenge. I’d like to see him try. He and Tucker Carlson have this thing going where they screw up their faces and pretend to ignorance, as if it were to their credit, and the routine is getting old fast.

His latest schtick is to declare that women are disgusting if they don’t shave off all their body hair.

Morgan and co-host Susanna Reid were discussing the new campaign ‘Januhairy‘, which encourages women to not shave their armpits and embrace their natural hair.

But Morgan was repulsed by the idea, and after being shown images of celebrities who have decided not to shave – including Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts – the GMB presenter said he died inside.

Reid asked Morgan if he shaved his pits, to which he replied a firm, No.

“Is that laziness?” Reid then asked.

No because women don’t have a problem with that. But men don’t fancy women who let it all out in January.

Apparently, someone needs to urgently inform Lady Gaga, Madonna and Julia Roberts, and all other women, that it is their duty to satisfy Piers Morgan’s sexual kinks. I think they need to grow even more body hair, because if a few tufts of armpit hair make him die inside, a bit more fuzz might make him die the rest of the way, which would be nice.

Also curious if women out there really want to know anything about Piers Morgan’s armpits, because I didn’t. I could have lived a long, contented life without ever considering Morgan’s body hair, and I feel like him forcing me to think about it was a terrible violation.

Here’s something even worse: Kate Smurthwaite appeared on Susanna Reid’s show (Morgan is just the dull sidekick there) to talk about why women shouldn’t feel compelled to shave, and he got totally sidetracked with the revelation that Smurthwaite is polyamorous…so he had to jack up the creepiness quotient by pestering her with prurient little questions.

Kate Smurthwaite, a comedian, was describing how her hairy armpits have never stopped her from finding a lover, and Piers was desperate to get back to his conversation.

He asked her: Can I talk about your polyamorous thing for a minute, because I’ve never heard of this thing? What does that mean?

Oh god. He’s never heard of this thing. Right. That was just an excuse to continue to probe into a woman’s sex life, in public.

Why does this horrible little man appear on television? Promise me, English-type persons, you’re not going to someday elect him to be prime minister, are you? Because that seems to be a common trajectory in our little colony, rising from cheap bigoted ‘entertainer’ to high office. I’d hate to see it happen to you.

If you’d like to see the whole episode, here it is. Morgan was more of a sleazy prat than I imagined, and Smurthwaite was smart, classy, and funny.

Ken Ham wants to argue that his fake boat is an objective part of a secular program of education

Ken Ham is pissed off. The FFRF has been telling local schools that field trips to the Creation “Museum” and Ark Park are violations of the separation of church and state, and that they don’t get to pretend that going to a religious venue has a secular purpose. Ham insists that public schools trooping their students off to his exercise in bibliolatry is not unconstitutional.

As leading civil rights attorneys will tell you, if classes tour the Ark or museum in an objective fashion to supplement the teaching of world religions, literature, interpretation of history, etc., the field trip is an educational experience. Now, if students were brought to the Ark or museum and told by their teacher that the religious content should be accepted as truth, then we would acknowledge that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution would be violated.

As educators are aware, however, it is well established in the law that the Bible may be used in the classroom objectively, as part of a secular program of education. As long as the teacher doesn’t express a personal opinion about the Bible, there is no issue whatsoever.

This is a weird argument. So a teacher could take their class to a church service, and as long as they kept a straight face and didn’t say whether the hour-long ceremony they sat through wasn’t true, they’re off the hook? It’s just a secular fact-finding expedition? I call bullshit.

The entire purpose of those AiG carnival shows is to tell visitors that their “literal” interpretation of the Bible is true, that the scientific evidence must be reinterpreted biblically, and that science is wrong. They can’t seriously propose that their stuff is not religious and evangelical. I guess we already know that honesty isn’t one of the things AiG practices, though, so that’s not going to stop Ham from this grand lie.

But I’m not a lawyer. I actually have problems with trying to block creationists on purely Constitutional grounds of the separation of church and state, although I know that’s often been the bulwark of our defense against creationist incursions into the schools.

You ought not to take students to the Ark Park because it’s pseudo-science and flagrant science denialism. Why would you trek across the state to some obscure caricature of a “museum” where your students will be intentionally misinformed when you could go to the Kentucky Science Center or the Cincinnati Museum Center? Are you a responsible educator who looks for the best opportunities to teach, or are you a hack who drags kids off to irrelevant tourist traps where dogma won’t be challenged?

Jesus, I see stories about religious kooks a thousand miles away organizing bus trips to that garbage site, when they could be going to the Field Museum or the AMNH or the Smithsonian instead. It makes no sense. It’s not as if great science opportunities aren’t available all around the country, so you have no recourse but to go to a bad freak show and make up stories about how you’re exposing them to secular interpretations of science.

Ken Ham is just a con artist.

I also don’t read the Daily Stormer. Wonder why?

I once looked at Quillette. I immediately broke out in hives and started retching. It was obvious from the get-go that this was a haven alt-right hacks, racists, genetic determinists, and apologists for the status quo, so I stopped reading it and haven’t gone back since.

Now Slate has published a review of sorts of the site. I don’t read Slate all that much either, but at least it isn’t all aggrieved white people complaining about the Left. It’s not a great review — the author seems more concerned about comparing Quillette to Slate than actually discussing the flaws in Quillette — but it does make a few good points.

In November, Politico Magazine published what was billed as “the first serious profile” of Quillette.com, and of the website’s founder, Claire Lehmann. The crowdfunded online journal, which Lehmann launched from her home in Sydney in 2015, has gained a major following among aggrieved rationalists, oppressed contrarians, and sundry other stifled surfers of the Intellectual Dark Web. As of this year, 1 million unique visitors are said to visit the site each month, and its output of politically incorrect, freethinker-y essays on identity politics, campus protests, and evolutionary psychology has been cheered by IDW celebrities such as Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris.

You can just stop there. That’s enough. Now you know why I don’t read it — it’s more conservative garbage and unscientific bullshit. But I thought this next paragraph was amusing.

Lehmann describes her online magazine as “a space for unusual viewpoints” that is free of “puritanical partisan hysteria” and protects “the freedom of expression and conscience that allows imagination and fearless creativity to thrive.” Here’s another slogan for the site, which Lehmann shares with pride: Back in 2016, before Quillette attained its present notoriety, the A-list atheist Jerry Coyne instructed his readers to “think of it as Slate, but more serious, more intellectual, and without any Regressive Leftism.”

Apparently, freedom from “partisan hysteria” means that you call the Left “regressive” and don’t allow their views to be expressed. Allrighty then. No irony here, no sir.

Also, “A-list atheist” has long since stopped being a term of praise. I think I might have been a B-list atheist once upon a time, I’m still trying to live it down.

Boghossian in a panic!

He thinks he’s going to be fired from his position at Portland State. That’s not necessarily the case, but Boghossian has been found guilty of ethical misconduct for his “grievance studies” exercise.

Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers.

Their defense is peculiar. James Lindsay literally says “It’s not actually scholarship”, Pluckrose says, “They can’t say we needed IRB approval…because there weren’t any real human subjects”, and that they couldn’t ask for IRB approval because that would tip off the (human) reviewers they were trying to trick. But that’s nonsense — of course you can do blind and double-blind studies on humans, IRBs approve those all the time. Here’s what they actually expected:

“An IRB protocol application should have been submitted to the Office of Research Integrity,” reads a determination letter from Portland state’s IRB dated last month. “University policy requires that all research involving human subjects conducted by faculty, other employees and students [on campus] must have prior review and approval by the IRB.”

Exactly. As an extra bonus, having an official declaration of exactly what they were trying to do and how they planned to analyze it ahead of time would have been more persuasive that they were actually doing a real study. But they weren’t, and they’ve even admitted it — if it’s not really scholarship, then what was it? I don’t know. Garbage? A publicity stunt? Propaganda?

It’s also the hypocrisy.

Over all, Christensen said he and Sears believe that Boghossian “wants to have it both ways.” That is, publicly presenting his project as a “rigorous study that exposed flaws in the peer-review system” while also “claiming that the hoax wasn’t a genuine study, and therefore IRB approval doesn’t apply.”

I don’t do research on humans, but even I know this kind of work demands IRB review (spider research doesn’t, at all), and I’m a bit shocked that they didn’t even discuss it with an IRB officer. I don’t even see any reason to expect that the application would be turned down, except possibly over its lack of rigor and poor foundation. By not going through the protocols — which even Boghossian admits are important and necessary — they did a disservice to research.

I agree with this assessment.

“We think that he did commit academic fraud, by design, and that some professional sanctions might be warranted,” Christensen continued. Boghossian and his colleagues “did misrepresent themselves, they did falsify their evidence and they did commit a serious infraction of research misconduct by deceiving these editors, wasting the time of the readers and then publicly slandering the journals and their fields. It is the right of any university to investigate fraud perpetrated by its employees.”

They also wasted the time of reviewers — you know that reviewing papers is unpaid service work for professors, right?

But guess who is defending Boghossian: Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker. Of course.

At least we’ve got the authors on record now admitting that their “study” wasn’t a study, and wasn’t even any kind of scholarship at all.

Bad day in the lab

The good news: I’m getting roughly one new egg sac every week, so I’ve had one produced on 27 December, another on 4 January, and another this week, on 7 January. I can make progress with that level of production.

Except the bad news: that egg sac from December should have hatched out by now. I opened it up: mostly dead. There were a total of 35 eggs in it; 6 had made it to the postembryo stage, and then died; 4 had made it past the first instar, and then croaked; 24 were arrested in an earlier embryonic stage, and were clearly not going to make it any further. There was ONE second instar survivor, waving its legs weakly in the midst of the charnel house of its siblings. That’s not very good. I’m not even certain the survivor is going to make it — I put it in a little chamber of its own with a fruit fly it can try to eat.

The other egg sacs…well, I’ll have to wait and see. I isolated the one from 4 January, and like the December clutch, put it in a petri dish on a cotton pad, which I spritz with water daily. Unfortunately, I’m finding that the pad doesn’t seem to help, acting more as a dessicant, I think. So I threw out the cotton on that second clutch. I’m leaving the 7 Jan sac with its mommy, in a large vial. We’ll compare outcomes under those two conditions.

Another hypothesis for this problem is that my original wild caught stock produced vigorous clutches of spiderlings, where the majority were healthy and fine…and cannibalistic, which contributed to a rapid culling. All of the egg sacs recently have been the product of inbreeding between progeny of the extraordinarily fecund Gwyneth. So I’ve placed my sole remaining male, a son of Gwyneth, in the company of a daughter of Xena, and will, I hope, get a new outbred clutch to compare. Or maybe Xena1 will consume the puny male. It was tough to get Xena0 to put up with any mates at all.

It would be interesting if Parasteatoda were sensitive to genetic inbreeding, rather than this low output being a result of my poor spider husbandry skills. I’m so used to zebrafish and flies that don’t care if you cross an individual with its sibling, its offspring, its parents, its grandparents (The Aristocrats!), but it is possible that wild species that engage in more mixing might be carrying a higher load of recessive lethals…although I’d also think there’d be limits to how much mixing there’d be in a synanthropic species with limited mobility in adults. Maybe there’s a lot of juvenile ballooning going on that I’ve missed? I’ll have to keep my eyes open in the spring, and see how my garage gets repopulated.

I’ve also noticed something strange going on in my brain. The questions I’ve been asking myself have been shifting from the generally embryological to something more ecological — I might turn into an eco-devo guy yet.

I’m afraid

My wife is something of a packrat, especially with papers — she has a dread of losing some important documentation, so she keeps it all. All of it. Bank statements from 1995, that sort of thing.

Then last night she started watching this Marie Kondo show. I’m cringing. I want Kondo to stop smiling like a manic mannequin. I’m getting annoyed that she shows up at these people’s houses, does next to nothing other than making a few suggestions, like how to fold clothes, and tells them to get to work and turn their belongings upside down…and then leaves. The family then gets to work and does everything.

She does have some good ideas, but the weird meditation thing at the start, and thanking the clothing you’re throwing out…no thanks. I don’t need the bogosity layered on top of the practical.

But my wife is getting a gleam in her eye, and has suggested that we should watch another episode or two tonight. She also moaned with delight when these couples talk about how cleaning together has brought them closer together. I’m worried that I’m going to get dragged into the KonMarie cult, even if it does mean we’ll finally get rid of all those boxes full of useless, ancient paper. Has anyone else been suffering through this? Does anyone know any good deprogrammers?

They’re not all fools down in Kentucky

Some sure are, like Ken Ham and his crew, or that bozo Bevins, but it’s also home to well-respected universities where they teach good science and groan about the clowns besmirching their reputation. The University of Kentucky recently put up a plaque honoring past faculty who fought against anti-scientific nonsense.

Note also in the comments that Joe Felsenstein points out that TH Morgan was a Kentuckian. Would that more citizens of Kentucky would take pride in their distinguished son than in the Australian weirdo who exploited cheap land and biddable public servants to erect a monument to folly — and his pocketbook — in their state.

I get YouTube comments

Comments on YouTube are often superfluous noise — many of them are by people who didn’t bother to watch the video, but are simply insisting on their right to add a noxious ingredient to the toxic soup simmering in that section. This one is no exception. It has nothing to do with my video, but…there it is.

did this joker put the sun in the sky – did this joker separate night from day – light from darkness did this joker put the planets in rotation- did bacteria create the sun that gives you life- the people that run this planet believe in Satan. if Satan exists does god also not exist. If the bible or god is not about morals why do the commandments tell us not to kill not to steal not to lie not to commit adultery if these are not principles of morality what is. Whether or not Jesus existed is not the point it is the message that counts not the messenger .Do you not believe in forgiving those that have harmed you. Do you not believe in being charitable – then why do so many humans help each other out in times of need, such as in natural disasters. What has any scientist ever done for humanity. They cannot even cure a common cold. Their is only. one good scientist that was Nicholai Tesla

I’ve seen this obsession with Nikola Tesla before. He was a great engineer and an interesting scientist, with a lot of weird ideas late in life that didn’t really pan out, but fueled his popularity as an iconoclast, and also led a lot of people to ascribe mystical ideas to him. Unfortunately for them, Tesla also said, “what we call ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the ‘soul’ or the ‘spirit’ ceases likewise.” I guess he was a servant of Satan, too.