Fathers and baby girls and our nation of evil

I have three kids. One of them is a daughter (not that I like daughters more than sons, they’re all great, but that it’s relevant today). This is Skatje when she was a child:

Now she has a daughter. This is Iliana.

It’s a video. Go ahead, watch it. It’ll melt your heart. I check Skatje’s Instagram every morning, because nothing will cheer me up more than seeing that happy little baby. Well, maybe seeing my happy little grandson is just as heartwarming, but they’re not in competition.

Little kids are all wonderful. There’s a great big emotional trigger in those faces, and it makes me want to hug them and protect them and make the world safe for them.

You know, like a dad.

So I turn to the news today, and there’s The Picture. I’m not going to show it here, because it breaks my heart. It’s the photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, drowned and dead on the banks of the Rio Grande. I can scarcely bear it.

“They wanted a better future for their girl,” María Estela Ávalos, Vanessa’s mother, told The Washington Post.

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Tania Vanessa Ávalos and their daughter, Valeria, on Valeria’s first birthday.

They traveled more than 1,000 miles seeking it. Once in the United States, they planned to ask for asylum, for refuge from the violence that drives many Central American migrants from their home countries every day. But the farthest the family got was an international bridge in Matamoros, Mexico. On Sunday, they were told the bridge was closed and that they should return Monday. Aid workers told The Post the line to get across the bridge was hundreds long.

The young family was desperate. Standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, America looked within reach. Martínez and Valeria waded in. But before they all made it to the other side, to Brownsville, Tex., the river waters pulled the 25-year-old and his daughter under and swept them away.

As a father, I see this story, and I think — let them in. Let them all in. Tear down the walls and gates and blockades and embrace these people as fellow human beings in need of help. We have an obligation to everyone that is compromised by selfishness and greed and an evil hatred of others, and if we were a humane and great good state, we would be working to help, not harm.

Instead, we exploit our neighbors and when they flee the conditions we have created, we bar the door and watch them die. We watch children drown. The ones who make it across are thrown into concentration camps, and parents and children are separated, and kept in inhumane conditions.

We are the bad guys here. Not just slightly bad, either: history is going to look back on us and call us monsters. We kill baby girls and the fathers trying to protect them.

Then we get into debates about the meanings of words, and parse out the laws in our books, and reinterpret our history, all to justify cruelty and our privileges and dehumanize desperate people. There are people on the internet right now trying to claim that that family deserved it. There are politicians who are thinking are laws are not cruel enough.

The bodies of the dead lining our border tell us, though, that we are wrong. We are an evil empire that builds prisons to control people, and maintains armies and guards to make them fear. That is not hyperbole. The corpses of children tell us it’s an understatement.

I’ll just watch Iliana some more, and hope she is better treated than other baby girls…but they all deserve better than we give them.

DING DONG THE WITCH IS…fired, anyway

I just got home from a long day of wrangling student registration and doing bureaucratic paperwork and not getting to play with spiders, and I was kind of dragging, and then I got the cheery news.

NRATV has been cancelled, and so has Dana Loesch!

…the NRA has officially shut down production of NRATV. (Though they may continue to air past content.) The organization has apparently felt the network and its operating company Ackerman McQueen have become too extreme and too far removed from their core values. Also, according to the New York Times, there’s some sort of legal dispute between the two, as the NRA began audits of their contractors in relation to its tax-exempt status, and accused Ackerman McQueen of refusing to comply.

And on top of all of that, NRATV kept their viewership numbers secret, but it’s now being reported that the site had a measly 49,000 unique visitors in January. And Ackerman McQueen has reportedly been receiving $40 million annually from the NRA.

So it’s no wonder that NRA is cutting ties with the advertising firm. And that includes Loesch, who was apparently an employee of Ackerman McQueen, not the NRA directly.

Now the worry is what vicious violent sewer will adopt her as their rat queen next.

Anything but those Abrahamic religions

There has been a steady rise in the number of Nones in America, which troubles the Christian majority. You know what else they should worry about? The growth in the number of witches.

…radio host and author Carmen LaBerge noted on Twitter that the figures are striking in that witches outnumber certain Christian denominations.

“As mainline Protestantism continues its devolution, the U.S. witch population is rising astronomically. There may now be more Americans who identify as practicing witches, 1.5 mil, than there are members of mainline Presbyterianism (PCUSA) 1.4 mil,” she said Tuesday.

Portrayals of occultism as either fun or morally neutral have been appearing more in culture in recent years and in light of growing interest. Companies like cosmetics giant Sephora have attempted to capitalize on it, marketing a “Starter Witch Kit” to consumers interested in dabbling in witchcraft. However, the company angered a number of actual witches and was ultimately forced to apologize and pull the product.

I think what this ought to tell everyone is that there is growing dissatisfaction with organized religion and its patriarchal assumptions. People aren’t so much flocking to, as they are flocking away.

I’m personally not interested in becoming a Wiccan. Unless maybe they also knit.

Knitters & spiders rule, libertarians & centrists drool

David Neiwert was banned from Twitter. The reason: an alt-right troll with a Pepe the Frog avatar had reported him for using a profile picture that featured the artwork of his latest book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. Neiwert is a serious journalist, the troll is an awful little man who bragged about getting him banned, and the troll has experienced no consequences for being a weasely fascist apologist. Neiwert has compromised with Twitter to get the ban lifted, and it’s astonishing that they had to have any conversation at all…and that Twitter didn’t simply acknowledge a mistake and apologize and lift it immediately.

Neiwert has a few words for the medium.

…they couldn’t really explain why and how an account featuring a well-known (but ambiguous) hate symbol—namely, Pepe the Frog—in its profile and its avatar could report me and have me suspended, while that account remained untouched. I was told that this account’s posts weren’t notably hateful (truthfully, they were more in the vein of trolling than of overt white nationalist hate-mongering), so given that context, they chose not to act. That, however, fails to explain why—given that a quick perusal of my timeline would reveal that not only does my work not promote hate speech, it actively opposes it—I wasn’t afforded the similar benefit of the context.

This leads us to what I see as really the abiding problem for Twitter, and for all the social-media platforms, particularly YouTube and Facebook: wildly inconsistent and frequently wrongheaded enforcement of their rules. Twitter’s reassurances otherwise, it is painfully clear that many of the people in charge of making these decisions are either horribly trained or are ideologically ill-suited for the task. Let’s be clear: Hiring libertarians, particularly those inclined to equate hate speech with speech opposing it, for these tasks is a recipe for disaster. So is hiring people who have no idea that fascists are not liberals, or that neo-Nazis are no different than militia “Patriots.” Proper, thorough, and effective training is absolutely essential for these platforms to achieve their goals of ensuring community safety and having a welcoming platform reflective of an open democratic society, and its accompanying marketplace of ideas.

As long as people in power bend over backwards to be “fair” to racists, fascists, and misogynists, there’s going to be this phony conflict that advantages the assholes willing to exploit centrist and libertarian waffling.

Meanwhile, over on Ravelry…

Read the full policy. Note that there are 8 million users on Ravelry — this isn’t some obscure backwater of the web.

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.

This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.

We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.

Policy notes:

  • You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
  • We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
  • We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
  • We are not banning people for past support.
  • Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
  • Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.

You can help by flagging any of the following items if they constitute support for Trump or his administration:

  • Projects: Unacceptable projects will be provided to the member or made invisible to others.
  • Patterns: Unacceptable patterns will be returned to drafts.
  • Forum posts: right now, only posts written after Sunday, June 23rd at 8 AM Eastern
  • Profiles: Unacceptable avatars or profile text will be removed.

Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-po…

See, Twitter and Facebook, it’s not that hard. It’s possible to be politically neutral and fair, while also shutting down hate speech and Nazis.

Even back in my usenet days, the fabric arts groups had a reputation for being practical, no-nonsense associations that were intolerant of intolerance. It’s good to see their reputation is holding up.

Do I need to take up knitting now? I’ve kind of got my hands full with my arachnology projects…wait. Knitting. Spiders. Do you realize how naturally those two go together? You can’t argue with 300+ million years of the fiber arts.

If you’re wondering what triggered this policy, here’s the background.

Trolling the trolls

It’s just too easy. An Instagram model/influencer/whatever named Belle Delphine, who posts lots of self-portraits of herself in cat ears and is apparently popular with the 4chan/anime crowd of gamer boys, posted a photo of herself and said that if it got a million likes, she’d do some videos for PornHub, the explicit porn site. A million keyboards expired in the deluge of drool, and she met her goal. So she made the videos. All innocuous, with one, for example of her playing with a cat. Nothing porny at all.

The ensuing rage was delicious. Here’s my favorite example.

She ruined him. Stabbed him right in the punctuation lobe.

Experimenting with macrophotography

I’m following some of the suggestions mentioned in the previous thread — specifically, I got some extension tubes. $20? I can afford that much, at least. They worked, really well! There was one catch: lighting. I knew it was always going to come down to lighting. The ring light I had was just too cumbersome, and I ended up juggling camera, LED lighting, and specimen, which required 3 hands, and even with a pair of tripods (eventually, as I wrestled) it was incredibly awkward — not the kind of thing where you can say, “Oooh! A bug!” and whip your camera around for a fast picture. When you’re also experimenting with the aperture and the exposure, you need 4 hands.

So now I need a better way to manage the lighting, so I need to buy more stuff. This is the nature of photography, everything funnels you into making more purchases to feed your habit. I saw this video that emphasized inexpensive solutions, so I’m going to try an extender arm and a flash cord. I tried looking for a biology site that would show me how to grow a few more arms, and came up with zilch.

So I’m getting a few more low-cost widgets. This is going to set me on that slippery path to prowling camera stores, looking for a quick fix, isn’t it? I’ll be in a ditch in skid row, begging passers-by for a few coins for a new ND filter.

Anyway, a few rough pictures of a caterpillar below the fold. It’s good enough for me to see the potential.

[Read more…]

Morris, Minnesota is Number One!

In shortest commutes, that is.

Add it all up and the best place for commuters in Minnesota is Morris, where the overwhelming majority of those going to work spend 10 minutes or less on the roads, according UnitedStatesZipCodes.org which used data from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine the cities with the best and worst commutes in all 50 states.

The farming community in western Minnesota came in at No. 1 on the list of shortest one-way commute times followed by International Falls, where the average commute time is 11.7 minutes. Coming in third was Marshall at 12.4 minutes, with Wheaton at 12.8 minutes and Duluth at 13.3 minutes rounding out the top five.

I might skew the data a bit. I’d have to amble slowly, sniff the flowers, and catch a few spiders for it to take ten minutes to cross the street to the university. Some of our faculty live “way out” on the opposite side of town, about as far as you can get and still claim residence in Morris, and they walk or bicycle in about that amount of time to get to work.

I moved here from the Philadelphia suburbs where my commute to work was about an hour and a half each way. That move was about the most pleasant shock I could imagine.

Bye-bye, dino soft tissue

A lot of e-ink has been spilled over the claim, primarily by Schweitzer, that intact, ancient soft tissue can be found inside fossilized dinosaur bones. She made some interesting observations of mysterious stuff extracted from fossils, but what it is and whether it’s actually preserved dinosaur tissue has been contentious. It’s baffled me, that’s for sure, since it didn’t jibe with my understanding of chemistry, and I couldn’t imagine some SF stasis field operating inside old bones. Here’s an excellent summary of the problem.

Reports of dinosaur protein and complex organic structure preservation are problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it remains unclear how such organics would be preserved for tens of millions of years. If endogenous, putative dinosaur soft tissues should contain diagenetically unstable proteins and phospholipids, vulnerable to hydrolysis, although the released fatty acid moieties from phospholipids could be stabilized through in situ polymerization into kerogen-like aliphatic structures. At 25°C and neutral pH, peptide bond half-lives from uncatalyzed hydrolysis are too short to allow for Mesozoic peptide preservation, although hydrolysis rates can be decreased through terminal modifications and steric effects on internal bonds. Estimates based on experimental gelatinization suggest that, even when frozen (0°C), relatively intact collagen has an upper age limit of only 2,700,000 years. Secondly, the instances of dinosaur peptide preservation reported are older than the oldest uncontested protein preservation reported by at least an order of magnitude. The oldest non-controversial peptides include partially intact peptides from 3.4 Ma in exceptionally cold environments, as well as short peptides bound to eggshell calcite crystals from 3.8 Ma stabilized via unique molecular preservation mechanisms. The youngest non-avian dinosaur bones are 66 million years old; on both theoretical and empirical grounds, it seems exceptional that original proteins could persist for so long.

Yeah, what he said. Complex molecules like proteins and nucleotides are going to degrade slowly over time, so what’s preventing breakdown in these fossils? Idea like polymerization or chemical modification into more stable molecules have been floating around, but it’s hard to get around the empirical fact that even a molecule as stable as collagen is going to fall apart, eventually.

These authors do an exhaustive analysis of the organic compounds found in ancient fossil bones, and most persuasively, do positive controls with recent bones and bones that are fossilized, but younger, and what they find is that the original organic material degrades steadily and somewhat predictably, and that dinosaur bones are destitute of original dinosaur soft tissue. They can find collagen in, for instance, shark teeth from the Pleistocene-Holocene, but it’s undetectable in older specimens.

So how to explain the spongy soft stuff found by some investigators inside dinosaur bones? Previous investigators failed to take into account the ubiquity of microbes.

Previous studies have often reported purported endogenous ‘soft tissues’ within fossil dinosaur bone. However, these studies often do not fully address fossil bones being open systems that are biologically active. This can be seen in field observations, in Dinosaur Provincial Park and elsewhere, where fossil bone is frequently colonized by lichen on the surface or overgrown and penetrated by plant roots in the subsurface. This forces researchers to consider that subsurface biota (e.g. plant roots, fungi, animals, protists, and bacteria) could contaminate bone. Given that fungi can produce collagen, the need to rule out exogenous sources of organics in fossil bone is made all the greater. Even deeply buried bone has the potential to be biologically active, given the high concentration of microorganisms in continental subsurface sedimentary rock. The analyses presented here are consistent with the idea that far from being biologically ‘dead’, fossil bone supports a diverse, active, and specialized microbial community. Given this, it is necessary to rule out the hypothesis of subsurface contamination before concluding that fossils preserve geochemically unstable endogenous organics, like proteins.

I find the idea that bacteria and fungi can successfully infiltrate rocks and bones far more likely than that bone chemistry can somehow suspend the laws of thermodynamics for a hundred million years. I’m going to tentatively accept the explanation of recent bacterial contamination for the soft tissue in fossil bone controversy.

The study of fossil organics must consider potential microbial presence throughout a specimen’s taphonomic history, from early to late. Microbial communities interact with fossils immediately following death and after burial, but prior to diagenesis. Microbes are known to utilize bone and tooth proteins and fossil evidence of early fungal colonization has even been detected. More recent microbial colonization of fossil bone will occur as it nears the surface during uplift and erosion in the late stages of the taphonomic process. Furthermore, given that microbes can inhabit the crust kilometres below the surface, it might be predicted that bone remains a biologically active habitat even when buried hundreds of meters deep for millions of years. The extensive potential for microbial contamination and metabolic consumption makes verifying claims of Mesozoic bone protein extremely challenging.

Remember, dino fans, “life will find a way”. Bacteria are amazing.

Also, it seems to me that Schweitzer et al. have discovered an interesting and possibly important phenomenon, but it needs to be studied from the perspective of microbiology, not paleontology.

Saitta ET, Liang R, Lau MC, Brown CM, Longrich NR, Kaye TG, Novak BJ, Salzberg SL, Norell MA, Abbott GD, Dickinson MR, Vinther J, Bull ID, Brooker RA, Martin P, Donohoe P, Knowles TD, Penkman KE, Onstott T (2019) Cretaceous dinosaur bone contains recent organic material and provides an environment conducive to microbial communities. Elife. 2019 Jun 18;8. pii: e46205. doi: 10.7554/eLife.46205.