WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

My first thought was this joke, “WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!” Academics do have bitter fights, sometimes — they’re usually pretty polite, but I have seen a distinguished professor stand on his chair to point and scream at the speaker at a conference, who fired right back in kind. It was loads of fun.

But they’re also fighting over serious issues. This SciAm article is a good summary of ongoing battles among taxonomists. The core problems is that naming a species has a set of rules, and one of those rules is that the species has to be named in a published journal article…and online publishing has removed most of the barriers, and it’s become trivial to snag the preliminary work of a serious researcher and dump it to an online vanity “journal”, stealing credit and getting the privilege of naming it.

Vandals have zeroed in on the self-publishing loophole with great success. Yanega pointed to Trevor Hawkeswood, an Australia-based entomologist accused by some taxonomists of churning out species names that lack scientific merit. Hawkeswood publishes work in his own journal, Calodema, which he started in 2006 as editor and main contributor.

“He has his own journal with himself as the editor, publisher, and chief author,” Yanega says. “This is supposed to be science, but it’s a pile of publications that have no scientific merit.” (In response to questions about the legitimacy of his journal, Hawkeswood delivered a string of expletives directed towards his critics, and contended that Calodema has “heaps of merit.”)

Raymond Hoser also owns his own journal, the Australasian Journal of Herpetology (AJH). AJH has faced similar criticism since it was launched in 2009, despite claims by Hoser that the journal is peer-reviewed. “Although the AJH masquerades as a scientific journal, it is perhaps better described as a printed ‘blog’ because it lacks many of the hallmarks of formal scientific communication, and includes much irrelevant information,” wrote Hinrich Kaiser, a researcher at Victor Valley College in California, and colleagues in the peer-reviewed journal Herpetological Review.

They do propose a solution. The International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which approves species names, is behind the times, so tear it down and replace it with a more modern institution.

…move the code under a different purview. Specifically, they suggest that the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS)—the biology branch of the International Council for Sciences—should “take decisive leadership” and start a taxonomic commission. The commission, they propose, would establish hardline rules for delineating new species and take charge in reviewing taxonomic papers for compliance. This process, they say, would result in the first ever standardized global species lists.

“In our view, many taxonomists would welcome such a governance structure,” the authors write. “Reducing the time spent dealing with different species concepts would probably make the task of describing and cataloguing biodiversity more efficient.”

It may be time to make such a radical change. Raymond Hoser has named over 800 taxa. I’ve seen the work involved in actually thoroughly characterizing a new species and justifying it’s difference from extant species, and I can assure you that Hoser has not done that work 800 times.

I had to check the bottom of my office chair

I was relieved — it was made in Green Bay, Wisconsin, not by slave labor from MINNCOR, the Minnesota Department of Corrections. It seems that $700,000 worth of dorm and office furniture for the University of Minnesota is purchased from MINNCOR, but the money is not going to the inmates/workers.

While most inmates languish making less than $1 an hour, public records indicate that Minnesota Department of Corrections executives, including those at MINNCOR, made over $100,000 per year in fiscal year 2015-16. MINNCOR CEO David Milton made $58 an hour, approximately $120,000 per year starting in February 2016. Despite numerous lengthy, in-person conversations Milton declined to speak on the record for this article. Milton and his executive team lease inmate labor to private companies, government entities and nonprofits and manage the prison canteen system – the internal grocery and convenience store for inmates. MINNCOR’s overall sales revenue has expanded to $44 million for 2015 alone, with profits going to the DOC general fund and MINNCOR’s budget.

They’re paid a pittance, and the only place they have to spend that pittance is the company store.

That same year, the state’s disparate canteen systems were consolidated under MINNCOR. 2003 was also the first time that MINNCOR was profitable. Annual profits for 2003 totaled $100,000, jumping to $2.5 million in 2004. Writing in the Stillwater’s prison-produced and award-winning newspaper, Prison Mirror, investigative journalist and inmate Matt Gretz explained that when MINNCOR consolidated the canteen the expectation from inmates was that bulk purchases would cause prices to go down. Instead, canteen prices increased.

Centralization allowed the state to dip more easily into MINNCOR profits as budget cuts abound – putting more pressure on MINNCOR to generate profits. According to annual reports in 2008, canteen sales were 18 percent of MINNCOR’s revenue. By 2014 canteen sales amounted to $10.9 million, almost 25 percent of overall sales revenue for MINNCOR. This means that the single largest portion of money that MINNCOR earns comes from taxing the low wages that the organization pays inmates. After MINNCOR deducts up to 80 percent of an inmate worker’s pay for everything from the cost of confinement to victim restitution and medical co-pays, the little that is left of an inmate’s paycheck often goes to the canteen.

Like I said…slaves.

I wouldn’t boycott MINNCOR, though, since we shouldn’t punish the inmates, but I would think it only fair to arrest and imprison MINNCOR executives for corruption, and put them to work making chairs. I’d buy those.

How to demonstrate your love of animals

Kill them, take off all your clothes, snuggle up nakedly with their corpses, and have someone take your picture and post it to the internet (nsfw!). This is one of those public service campaigns to promote conservation that I just don’t get. Do these celebrities realize the props they are holding are dead animals? Is this more about flaunting your skin than doing good?

This might be one rare case where the useless phrase “virtue signaling” might actually be appropriate, because they sure as heck aren’t doing anything productive.

For sale: one country

You now have another reason to skip the state of the union address — the commercials.

President Trump is seeking to parlay his first State of the Union address on Tuesday into cash for his reelection campaign by offering supporters a chance to see their name flashed on the screen during a broadcast of the speech.

In a fundraising solicitation on Monday, Trump offered those willing to pay at least $35 the opportunity to see their name displayed during a live streaming of the address on his campaign website.

This guy really is a cheap huckster, isn’t he?

Scratch Wallace State off your list of prospective colleges, everyone!

Earlier, I expressed my concern that a quarter of college grads are creationists, and was worried about the students at my university. Maybe it’s not so bad. My excuse is that maybe those other colleges, like Wallace State, are bringing the average down.

The Wallace State Alumni Association is planning a group trip to…the Ark Park and Creation “museum”. Their chipper coordinator happily chirped out a few words of praise.

“This should be a great trip,” said LaDonna Allen, WSCC Alumni Coordinator. “The Ark Encounter opened in July 2016 and is a sister attraction of the Creation Museum located about 40 miles apart. We’ve heard lots of good things about both.”

Hmmm. Maybe Wallace State doesn’t want to be taken seriously by educated people, which is an awfully peculiar attitude for a college to take. They are sending out a crystal clear message that it’s a place for religious loons with no respect for science.

How did this guy become a darling of the conservative skeptic/atheist movement?

Jordan Peterson is mystifying. He’s a boring, tendentious, unoriginal authoritarian who gets most everything wrong. He’s not an atheist, as the following clips show, so why do atheists pay attention to him?

He has written a book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (of course a conservative book is all about arbitrary rules), which gets savagely reviewed.

Peterson, who has become one of the most prominent critics of anything that can be labelled as “political correctness”, is especially conservative on gender and family roles. “Female lobsters . . . identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him,” he writes. Generalising from the crustacean to the human he adds, “This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation.”

Apparently, the secret to success is to appeal to the vast audience of male lobsters.

Oh, look. David Brooks gives Peterson a thumbs up. Now we know what kind of person favors our Canadian authoritarian.

And that’s the good news?

A new poll shows that the number of creationists has declined to a new low. Hooray! Party time!

Except that the new low is 38% of the American population.

Oh, sure, it’s better, and the trend is going in the right direction, for now, but that’s the kind of percentage that can get a bad president elected. It’s not a majority, but it’s not a fringe group, either. It’s shocking that our citizens can reach adulthood and still be that ignorant.

We’re also supposed to be consoled by the fact that a university education helps some. “Only” a quarter of college graduates are creationists! You go through 4 years of solid advanced education in a first world technological nation, and still a fourth of them come out thinking there might be some merit to the idea that the Earth winked into existence sometime at the start of the Naqada culture in Egypt, or the Uruk era in Mesopotamia. Oh, and hey, the Assyrians must have been shocked that everyone went extinct (except for 8 people) right at the start of their empire. Must have been a small empire.

I don’t know if I want to know how many of our UMM seniors believe in this bullshit. I especially don’t want to know how many of our science majors leave here confident that they didn’t come from no monkey. It can only break my heart.

It’s always even worse than you can imagine

Jen Gunter attended a Goop conference in New York. She didn’t make a big deal of it, just paid the conference fee, sidled on in under her own name, and listened. I think she expected the wacky wellness woo, but maybe was a little surprised at the psychic mediums, the death cult vibe, and the boring tedium.

This fascination with death was 50% of the day and not in a productive “lets talk about how we die in America” kind of way, but in death is trip reserved for the privileged, like a cross between the movie Flatliners and cultures that believed in human sacrifice where the class born to be sacrificed were brought up to believe death is a goal and an honor. Monetizing death in this way is clearly profitable. The message seems to be I know you are afraid of dying so read my book or cross my palm with cash and I will share with you secrets about death that no one else can.

This is the way of it. Every time I’ve gone to a creationist or paranormal conference, I know I’m going to get a load of anti-science drivel, but I’m always disappointed by how bad they are, and how once the speakers are in the midst of the believers, how far they’ll scurry towards even greater lunacy. There’s no reward for moderation, so they’ll make the most outrageous, irrelevant claims, and the audience will eat it up. Sure, that guy over there was just in a coma, and claims to have visited heaven, but he had a heartbeat the whole time. I died, and I had turned into a giant tumor, and I was rotting, and bits were falling off me, and I came back from the dead by force of will, so you should believe me more!

I’d recommend that everyone should attend one of these kinds of events at least once, just to see how nutty they are, but I’m afraid some people might be persuaded by the fervency of the believers, and the visit would just add more lost souls to their ranks.