Why does it have to be a science teacher?

Matt Baish is a terrible person.

He’s “angry” about Greta Thunberg visiting his area, so he “jokes” about not having a sniper rifle. Funny. Hilarious. Except that it’s sad how going right-wing causes atrophy of one’s sense of humor.

Fortunately, he’s been placed on administrative leave, so he won’t be poisoning students’ minds. This still disturbs me:

Baish, who is listed as a science teacher on the Waterloo West High School’s website, was placed on administrative leave after responding to a Facebook post about Thunberg visiting Iowa City this week, a local ABC affiliate reported.

Thunberg’s reputation rests on her fierce support for taking action against climate change; she spoke to congress and told them to listen to the scientists. This bozo so strongly hates that message that he’d make veiled threats against her? How can he be teaching good science?

#Arachtober: The #Spider Swarm!

My colleague, Chris Atkinson, told me yesterday that he’d been seeing a lot of spiders in his compost heap. “Interesting,” I thought. Then he sent me this photo:

WHOA. Look at all those spiders.

So I stopped by this morning (how could I not?), and the photo doesn’t do it justice. It is spider paradise. It’s a spider commune. There are all kinds of bugs living in the compost, and all over above them is a dense communal spider web, packed with spiders. I’d suspected it from the first picture, but I stuck my face down there and confirmed it — Steatoda borealis, the Northern Combfoot, which I’ve occasionally found while prowling about town, but this was the Mother Lode. I got a few closeups of one of their number in their web.

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What “heritability” actually means

I often get brought up short when someone tells me that intelligence, for instance, is 80% determined by your genetics. I’m held up because that someone clearly doesn’t understand the magic word “heritability”, which every geneticist understands but every layman seems to consciously misunderstand, preferring to play games with folk etymology than actually understand the math, or the concept. So here’s a nice video that explains the background clearly, and as a bonus, show that Sam Harris doesn’t know diddly squat about the science behind the racism he endorses.

The pig pandemic is here

Don’t we have enough bad news? There’s always something slipping its way into our nightmares, and this one is the African Swine Fever sweeping across Asia.

It is being described as the biggest animal disease outbreak the world has ever seen. Its impacts are already profound in Asia and beyond, with increased export demand certain to support pork prices for the foreseeable future. There will be longer-term implications of Asia’s African swine fever (ASF) outbreak, too, concerning the production and consumption of pork, some of which are already becoming apparent.

Nice to know pork prices will be propped up by the ongoing devastation. But read the rest: a quarter of the world’s pig population faces imminent death. And it’s spreading!

Official figures from China show the national pig herd had declined by 32% year-on-year by July, with an estimated 100 million pigs lost already. While some of the losses will be directly or indirectly linked to the disease itself, the reduction is also being heavily driven by vast numbers of producers choosing to slaughter their herds and get out of pigs before the virus gets to them.

Rabobank is forecasting that, by the end of the year, China’s pig herd will have halved. Given that it numbered 700 million and accounted for half the world’s pigs before ASF struck in August 2018, the damage the virus is causing is plain for all to see.

And that is just China. ASF is continuing to spread across Asia at a worrying rate, confirmed in September for the first time in South Korea, where six cases were confirmed within two weeks, and the Philippines, where 12 cases were recorded in one area in a short time.

In Vietnam, infected soon after China, the virus has reached all 63 provinces and around 5 million pigs have been killed. Rabobank forecasts a 15-20% reduction in pork production in Vietnam this year.

An industry comprising millions of, often remote, ‘backyard’ farmers, with little concept of biosecurity was always going to be easy prey for a virus that can travel and survive in tiny quantities for a long time on animals, people, clothes, vehicles and equipment. It also became clear at an early stage that the virus had become embedded in the pig feed chain and was being spread via swill feeding. It is also in the human pork supply chain, helping its spread around the continent.

It hasn’t yet affected the American midwest (Hello, Iowa! I hear you’re a major pork producer?) or Europe, but oh boy, imagine the chaos if it did. I hope our understanding of biosecurity is more robust than that of Chinese farmers, but I have my suspicions that no, our local swine farms are not at all constrained by science. Capitalism, baby!

Worse than Lovecraft: What if the Old Ones were real, but they’re all extinct?

Fantasio

One of my commonly made arguments against the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is that it seems to be remarkably rare on our planet — I’m not making a joke about Republicans (although I could), but am stating a fact, that in the half-billion year history of animal life on Earth, only one species has followed the evolutionary strategy of extreme reliance on technology, ours. It doesn’t seem to be a common way for complex multi-cellular organisms to succeed, so we should expect that even if that kind of life is common on other worlds, it’s not likely to produce organisms we can talk to.

But what if I’m wrong? What if intelligent life had arisen on Earth multiple times? Would we be able to recognize it in the geological record?

Forget about the SF tropes of finding the equivalent of the Statue of Liberty on a beach somewhere, or digging up a transistor radio. All the monuments and all the toys we’ve built would be crumbled away and ground into dust in a million years or so. But what about chemical traces? We’ve been pumping out all kinds of novel chemistry, maybe some bits of it would leave a signature behind for our successors to discover.

That’s the question asked in this article by Schmidt and Frank. What should we look for?

If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.

Like they say, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty — on a geological scale, we don’t know how long industrial byproducts will linger. Stuff like plastics and halogenated organics might persist for a long time, in the right environment, such as after being buried and sequestered. Maybe we should look in ancient sediments for compounds that are likely to have been produced by a technological society.

In a real twist, the authors also wrote a science fiction story about such a search. What if we found PCBs and transuranic elements in a deep stratum, and what if it was also associated with an abrupt change in climate or the biota of the time? How would scientists interpret that?

What I found most chilling, though, was the long list of unexplained, abrupt climate shifts they describe in the geological record. Worst case scenario: what if they were all caused by the appearance of species that achieved some kind of global dominance (not necessarily technological) that led to a brief period of self-defeating triumph that always led to their inevitable extinction?

I think I just gave myself nightmares. What if we launched a SATI (Search for Ancient Terrestrial Intelligence) program, found multiple instances, and learned that our peculiar niche is more common than we thought, and always leads to our decline and disappearance? Would that knowledge allow us to change, do better, and escape our doom, or would it tell us that any attempt would be futile?

Worse than finding Cthulhu would be finding it’s traces, and learning that it was long dead, it’s annihilation pre-ordained by its nature, as we will be.

Schmidt GA, Frank A (2019) The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology 18(2): 142-150.

When did “liberal” become a slur?

It wasn’t when the Republicans started sneering at the word. That was a mark of honor. I was happy to call myself a liberal during Reagan’s term.

It really started going rancid when Bill Maher adopted the label. “Liberal” now meant sexist hack and apologist for war and racism.

A week previously, Maher appeared on MSNBC’s flagship breakfast show, Morning Joe (9/12/19), where he claimed that the Democrats’ left-wing (i.e., Bernie Sanders) was a “cancer” destroying the party, warning that the left is “scarier and crazier than Trump,” and nominating a leftist as its presidential candidate would spell disaster in the next election. (Decrying the supposed unelectability of the left is a favorite pastime of elite pundits—FAIR.org, 2/26/19, 7/2/19, 8/21/19.)
Media almost unanimously present Maher as a “liberal” (e.g. Salon, 10/11/14, 9/21/19; USA Today, 7/8/18; New York Post, 6/29/19) or even a “progressive” (The Hill, 2/2/17) comedian. Yet any inspection of his political positions dispels this illusion. To be sure, he generally supported President Barack Obama and opposes Donald Trump (although he has been known to do the opposite of both). But he also has a long history of repeatedly taking reactionary positions on many subjects, especially war.

On his previous Comedy Central show Politically Incorrect, Maher praised the Vietnam War as “necessary,” arguing it helped end the Cold War. (The US officially began its involvement in Vietnam 36 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.) In 2013, he joked about killing antiwar activist Medea Benjamin after she interrupted Obama, and recanted his anti-Iraq War position, claiming, “Iraq is doing better than I thought it would be.” He praised George W. Bush for “creating a country” there.

Need I point out that he’s also an anti-vaccination atheist, and a libertarian? He uses his criticisms of Trump as a merkin to cover up his fundamental illiberalism. But this part is legitimately true:

Ultimately, Maher has built up an impressive following and continues to espouse snarky elitist hot takes weekly for HBO, earning an estimated $10 million per year doing so. Call him a racist, a bigot or an astute businessman; just don’t call him a liberal.

Although I can’t say that embracing the values of the 1990s through the Trump years to his own profit is exactly the mark of a principled person.

I don’t call that teaching

I guess Professor E.David Davis of the North Carolina State University never learned how to teach, although he did learn how to be a sexist jerk.

Maira Haque is a junior at NC State and was outraged by what she said Davis said in class to another student. Haque says Davis called on a female student in the class and when she didn’t have the answers to his questions about an assignment, things escalated.

“You’re 20 years old and you forgot to bring this assignment in. Were you dropping the head as a child? Do you have memory problems?” Haque said.

Next, she said, the professor selected another student to answer a question and she too didn’t have the answer.

“She didn’t have the paper either and before he even could begin berating her or anything, she said ‘I have memory problems too,’” Haque said. “And that made everyone laugh, but he kept going and he was like, ‘I guess the women in this class are useless. I guess I should call on a man.’

How well does belittling your students work as a pedagogical exercise, I wonder. Students are already anxious and overworked, I don’t need to ramp that up; if I see a number of students struggling to keep up, that tells me that I need to slow down and try to help. That’s my job.

Don’t worry about Professor Davis. He had an excuse for his behavior. It’s the same excuse I’ve heard from assholes for years.

The professor justified his comments by saying, “Well, obviously, it was a joke. Women are obviously useful because we need them for a species to reproduce,” according to a Twitter video.

“It was just a joke”, compounded by the distasteful argument that “we” (I presume he means us men?) need them just for their ovaries.

That guy should not be teaching at all. I won’t say that it sounds like he’s been dropped on his head a few times, but will instead suggest that his university send him off for remedial training in basic education skills and in humanity. We need to help him catch up with the good faculty, you know.

Jacob Wohl gives Elizabeth Warren a lock on the presidency

Once again, Jacob Wohl claims to have a sexual assault victim, and once again he gives a presser in Burkman’s driveway. This time, it’s an accusation against Elizabeth Warren, that she had sex with a Marine bodybuilder. Surprise, the “victim” showed up this time.

Whoa. A 70 year old woman had sex with a muscular 24 year old man? As long as it was consensual, good for her. I have to agree with this sentiment.

Spectator writer Caroline McCarthy joked, “Look, I get that this is BS and the “decorated, former U.S. Marine” will mysteriously cancel on the event, but Elizabeth Warren being a voracious cougar who hooks up with 24-year-old bodybuilders would make me want to vote for her.”

Except, of course, that this is a Jacob Wohl story, so you know it’s all lies. It’s also already falling apart. The Marine tried to claim that the scars on his back are a result of wild crazed sex with Warren (woohoo!), but unfortunately someone dug into his instagram feed and found his original explanation.

I prefer to imagine a naked Elizabeth Warren totally dominating a beefy young man, lashing him viciously with a chain, but I’m sorry, it just didn’t happen. Jacob Wohl never says anything accurate.

Why isn’t he in jail already?