I am disappointed in Marv

Marv hadn’t heard of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire until now.

There is something deeply wrong with American education when one of the most important labor tragedies in our history isn’t taught any more. Should we also let him know about the Haymarket riot, the Colorado labor wars, the Imperial Valley lettuce strike? That it was routine to call out the national guard to beat workers into submission? I suppose we’re going to have to roll back the tape to Peterloo, or earlier.

Do listen to the video, though. Elizabeth Warren does explain it all…and also explains how corporate interests have spent a lot of money to bury their shameful history. That’s one thing the bad guys have always had, more money than the people they’re exploiting.

But that’s all in the past, right? It’s not as if millionaires and billionaires are buying our government today, right?

To influence the court’s composition, Whitehouse said, a combined $34 million in “dark money” went toward both blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland and confirming President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

In a follow-up to the legal brief, Whitehouse in a Sept. 6 Washington Post op-ed described the money as follows:

“One unnamed donor gave $17 million to the (Leonard) Leo-affiliated Judicial Crisis Network to block the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and to support Gorsuch; then a donor — perhaps the same one — gave another $17 million to prop up Kavanaugh.”

It sure would be nice to elect a president and congress who opposed corruption, rather than welcoming it, as Moscow Mitch and Trump have done.

The Gideons are on campus again

I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, it’s heartwarming to see all the students spurning the offer of a testament. They’re very polite about it — this is Minnesota, after all — but watching the students wave them away or say “No, thank you” is pleasant.

On the other hand, I walked past three small groups of Gideons this morning, and they glance at me and look away, and never offer. How can they tell? Is it the lines of debauchery and degeneracy on my face that scream “Godless!” when they look at me? Do they really have a hot-line to God, who whispers to them “Never mind” when I walk by? Do I have Resting Atheist Face?

I hear that can be corrected with surgery now. I just need a blissed-out, dull-witted look stitched onto my face, I guess.

First, furry Nazis, then we conquer the world!

Milo Yiannopoulos is really getting desperate. He’s looking for an audience, any audience, that will pay attention to him, and he has battened on a peculiar one: right wing furries. What I’ve known of the furry community is that they’re extraordinarily tolerant — these are people who belong to a ridiculed minority, and their reaction has been openness and acceptance. Apparently, there is an even tiny minority of alt-right people within this small minority of fans of furry culture, and Milo wants to make himself king of this tiny sliver.

He announced that he would be attending a furry con.

Yiannopoulos posted an email screenshot to one of the few platforms he has left—his Telegram messaging channel—on Saturday and claimed he registered for Midwest FurFest, a convention “to celebrate the furry fandom” hosted in the suburbs on Chicago this December. “Furries,” as they’re often called, are groups of people who have interest in animal personas with human characteristics; people who participate in the subculture often present themselves as non-human characters via art and costumes.

Yiannopoulos also claimed on Telegram that he had submitted a form to suggest he host a panel called “The Politics of Fur.” He asked his followers who plan to attend Midwest FurFest to message him to arrange “dinner, drinks, photos or anything else.”

I suppose it’s possible that he’s long yearned to be a snow leopard, but more likely he just wants to take advantage of a few people — that’s always been his modus operandi as a professional scammer. Unfortunately for him, conference organizers saw right through him and rejected his application. I don’t think there are many niches left where everyone doesn’t know exactly what kind of hateful slimeball he is.

He has now announced that he is going anyway, despite not being registered. I don’t know what he’s planning to do…get drunk in the bar and dance around in the lobby, mocking the attendees? That is his art, after all. I don’t think it will win him a beachhead in the furry community.

He does have an impressive ego. It must make it hard to cope with his irrelevance.

rms resigns

For such a notoriously self-proclaimed rational guy, Richard Stallman doesn’t know how to write a proper resignation letter. His makes no sense.

A renowned MIT computer scientist resigned Monday amid outrage over his remarks describing a victim of financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as seeming “entirely willing” and posts to his personal blog advocating for the legalization of pedophilia and child pornography.

In a post on his personal site, Richard Stallman, a visiting scientist at MIT and well known open source software developer, was unapologetic: “To the MIT community, I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.”

Every critic of Stallman misunderstood and mischaracterized him. He’s the victim here, according to rms.

OK, let’s grant him that. Let’s assume everyone got everything all wrong, and is falsely abusing the poor man. Then why resign? Does he think the stories and quotes (errm, “misquotes”, I guess) will end? Does his resignation resolve anything? If he were being harassed to the point that he could no longer do his work, that would be one thing; but he doesn’t say that. He’s getting some vague “pressure” due to “misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.

Here’s what I think is going on. He’s dug himself into a deep hole with his record of saying stupid things, and he doesn’t see a way out, because ultimately he still thinks he was totally right about everything, and trying to defend himself would involve making more stupid statements. There aren’t any misunderstandings, we all understand perfectly well what he was saying, we just think he’s wrong. And he’s sort of aware that trying to change our mind about that would require reaffirming many of his previous stances, yet he’s a smart guy who knows the wind is blowing in a new direction, so he’s just going to get more dissent.

He’s dug this hole, so now he’s going to just sit in it and tell everyone they’re poopyheads who don’t understand him. That’s fine. Go right ahead. I think rms has found the right position for himself at last.

In case you’re wondering what repulsive things he said that warranted the scorn levied at him, here’s a recap.

Last week, Motherboard published the full email thread in which Stallman wrote that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims in his campaign of trafficking were “entirely willing.” Stallman also argued about the definition of “rape” and whether the term applies to the victims.

When someone else in the email thread pointed out that victim Virginia Giuffre, who was 17 when she was forced to have sex with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, Stallman said “it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”

Never, ever be that guy who nitpicks about whether rape might be acceptable depending on how many birthdays a woman has had.

The grass spiders are invading the science building now

At last, I’m useful! I was called to a colleague’s office because a big ol’ spider was squatting on their papers, staring at them, so I was summoned to capture the beast. I wasn’t too useful, though, since it fled under the desk and we couldn’t find it again. But later a brave student, Sophie, encountered it and scooped it up, and here it is. It’s Agelenopsis, a grass spider, perfectly harmless, but good sized for its species.

I will remind everyone that we’re hiring an ecologist, and one of the bonuses of working here is that I’ll be at your beck and call to handle any office spiders. Or if I fail, we have many bold strong students who are not at all intimidated by monstrous creatures.

[Read more…]

Biology is always more complicated than you expect

The first sign of a biased dilettante is when they try to reduce biological phenomena to a single parameter that exhibits a straightforward linear effect. It’s true of IQ, and it’s also true of testosterone. This is an excellent video that discusses the complex relationship of testosterone levels to athletic performance.

Why, it’s almost as if there are a thousand parameters, each nudging performance this way or that, and acting in a combinatorial fashion!

So…an atmosphere of super-heated steam? Sounds nice.

I’ve been seeing a lot of excitement about this new discovery on an extrasolar planet: it’s got water.

“We know that water vapor exists in the atmospheres of one extrasolar planet and there is good reason to believe that other extrasolar planets contain water vapor,” said Travis Barman, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona who made the discovery.

That’s cool. Not at all surprising, but cool. I shouldn’t think it unexpected that H2O is found throughout the universe. I’ve also been seeing naive gushing about prospects for colonizing other worlds. They never seem to take the other parameters of this planet into account.

HD209458b is separated from its star by only about 4 million miles (7 million kilometers)-about 100 times closer than Jupiter is to our Sun-and is so hot scientists think about it is losing about 10,000 tons of material every second as vented gas.

It’s also 220 times the mass of Earth and has a surface (I’m curious about what kind of surface this gas giant has) temperature of about 1000°C. Since it’s 159 light years away, I won’t be taking a vacation there in my lifetime.

Well, when you put it that way, maybe I’d like to visit, just a little bit.

Correction: the latest buzz is about K2-18b, a rocky planet that is only 7-10 times Earth’s mass, and a mere 110 light years away. Compared to HD209458b, it’s a paradise practically right next door!

How to interpret the data they’ve got seems to be complicated.

Ingo Waldman, on the University College London team, explained that three different scenarios fit the data equally well: The atmosphere could be pure hydrogen with lots of water, or the atmosphere could contain hydrogen and nitrogen with just a little bit of water. Or a third option allows for a hydrogen atmosphere, a “tiny speck” of water, and high-altitude clouds or hazes that obscure the view.

Benneke and his colleagues throw in another option: liquid water in addition to water vapor. Their calculations suggest that it could rain in the mid-atmosphere of this world.

I don’t think that, after our quick jaunt for a vacation on K2-18b, we’re going to be breathing that atmosphere. H2 on Earth is present in less than one part per million, so that they’re even discussing how much hydrogen fills the skies of K2-18b is a little off-putting.

The big tease

I refuse to believe anything new will come of this. I suspect it’s going to be nothing but a remarketing of old strips.

Besides, if Gary Larson were to come out of retirement, or even reveal a cached archive of 25 years of secret strips, I’m pretty sure that would be so momentous it would have to be a prelude to the end of the world.

Might be worth it, though.

How’s MIT doing lately?

MIT seems to be having a bad day week month year, and new horrors keep tumbling out all the time. Thanks, Jeffrey Epstein, the one good you did in your life was to make corruption visible!

  • You know, Richard Stallman has always been an egotistical jerk, so he had to poke his head up and demonstrate it once again. His latest is to claim that Epstein’s “harem” — I guess that’s his word for “victims” — were “mostly willing”. Ugh. You aren’t helping, rms. Crawl back into your hole.
  • Joi Ito pressured other faculty, like Naomi Oxman, to participate in rewarding Epstein for his “anonymous” gifts, and they in turn pressured their students to create and send gifts to him. What’s interesting is that the students were the ones to immediately question the whole process, and to feel guilty about succumbing to pressure afterwards. I guess MIT hadn’t had enough time to pound the ethics out of them yet.

I’ve noted elsewhere that the rich get richer, and colleges with already massive endowments tend to be the recipients of more corrupt gift giving…so they inherit all the filth that comes with the filthy lucre. I suspect our small liberal arts colleges would be just as guilty if billionaires were trying to impress their peers by giving us money.