Not funny

I did not like this Far Side cartoon for obvious reasons.

This could do real harm, burning the victim’s neck, and if I caught anyone doing this they would be immediately expelled from the lab. Not funny.

Additionally, I have a personal memory of my first year in general chemistry. I had a lab partner who was a total klutz — I carried her through that lab, in spite of her inability to titrate anything. She was a danger with a pipette, and every week I’d go back to the dorm to discover that somehow the back of my pants and shirt had been spattered with acids — when I’d do my laundry I’d discover all these holes in my clothes, which was also not funny.

I’ve wondered for years if my lab partner really disliked me, or if she was trying to get my attention because she liked me, or she was just ridiculously incompetent in the lab. It happened so often that I suspect the first possibility.

The dumb ones keep coming back

Some of you may recall a particularly obnoxious commenter who called himself Jinx McHue, among other names — he was one of those who made stupid comments, got banned, and then tried to make multiple appearances under different pseudonyms, and got banned for each one. I guess he’s still reading, because he tried to comment again, but he got blocked, as usual. But maybe you’d be entertained by his attempt?

So, you’re mad when he threatens to nuke Iran, but then you turn around and are mad when he doesn’t. You people are dumber than he is.

He doesn’t get it. Yes, we’re mad that he threatened to nuke Iran, because that would be evil and criminal. No, we’re not mad that he didn’t nuke Iran. We’re mad that he’s trying to implement international diplomacy by making evil, criminal threats and bragging about maybe doing war crimes.

I wonder…was he happy when he made the threat, or happy when he didn’t follow through?

Life from space? I have questions

Samples have been analyzed from two carbonaceous chondrites in space, Ryugu and Bennu, and they’ve been found to contain common organic molecules, specifically, the building blocks of DNA. That’s cool, not particularly surprising, and it’s good stuff to know…but then we get all these pop science articles speculating that life came from space. No, no, no — it tells us that these organic molecules are universal, that they can be assembled by all kinds of physical/chemical processes, and that nucleotides (for instance) do not require synthesis by living organisms. Chemistry is everywhere, but biology isn’t. Unfortunately, these kinds of observations always provoke people to babble about life, or at least the ingredients for life, falling from space. I don’t buy it.

Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens the case that the ingredients for life are abundant in the solar system and may have found their way to Earth from space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

OK, yes, it’s quite likely that some organic molecules fell to Earth from outer space. But please, think a little bit quantitatively. There are clouds of organic molecules in space, but they are incredibly diffuse and poorly concentrated. There are asteroids that are made of condensed lumps of carbon with richer concentrations of these molecules, but they are drifting in the vast empty volumes of space, and only occasionally falling to Earth, adding droplets of nucleotides to the Earth’s oceans.

Meanwhile, the Earth itself is a gigantic crucible containing 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water, with a complex pattern of heating and cooling, and immeasurable interactions with minerals and other organic molecules. It is a far weightier contributor to biochemistry than a thin, almost undetectable, vapor of scattered molecules in space. But these stories always get excited about the thin vapor rather than the fact that Earth itself is a rich churning cauldron of geochemistry that is going to be far more responsible for the wealth of biologically relevant chemistry we find ourselves swimming in.

This is not to discount how interesting these asteroid analyses are. They’re telling us that natural, unguided mechanisms can produce the biomolecules that make up life. The asteroids, though, are not likely to be where they originated here, on planet Earth, which is already a great place for building them.

The article says something else that irritated me.

Now, following the discovery of all five nucleobases in the Bennu pebbles, Koga and his colleagues have found the complete set in Ryugu. The findings lend weight to the so-called “RNA world” model of abiogenesis. In this hypothesis, early life on Earth depended solely on RNA as a self-replicating molecule, laying the biological groundwork for later, more complicated systems that involved DNA and protein-based organisms. The extraterrestrial samples from Ryugu and Bennu provide evidence that at least some of the nucleobases that made up these early lifeforms came from outer space.

No, this observation says nothing relevant to the RNA World hypothesis. It neither confirms nor refutes it. Nucleobases exist, we’ve known that for a long, long time, but I don’t believe that the earliest life on Earth depended solely on RNA, and finding nucleobases in a lifeless rock is not evidence that life was solely spawned from those few components. Were there no other molecules in them? No sugars, no amino acids, no polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, no carboxylic acids? There are a great many complex organic molecules found bubbling in the soup of our oceans, aren’t they a more likely source of life than a dead lump that’s been floating in space for billions of years?

Sorry. It’s a good bit of science, but I get cranky when I read these ill-informed unwarranted speculations that ignore more substantial science.

He always chickens out. Good.

Trump talked to some Pakistani leaders, and that was good enough. He has announced a ceasefire.

President Donald Trump said he’d agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday, less than two hours before his 8 p.m. deadline to destroy a “whole civilization.”

Trump said the ceasefire agreement was made on the condition that Iran agree to reopen the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!, Trump posted on Truth Social.

The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East, Trump wrote.

See? He thinks he won already. Iran said nothing.

How about if we just ignore him from now on and focus on the Epstein files and getting him out of office?

I’ve had few opportunities to photograph spiders

I haven’t been showing off my spiders much lately. There’s a reason for that. They still think it’s winter, so they’re all hunkered down in their mossy, silk-covered nests, and they don’t come out much, and when they do, they’re shy and not very photogenic. Here’s the best black widow shot I could get today.

I didn’t do myself any favors by providing them with a fairly cluttered environment, but they seem to like a space where they can hide and only come out to grab some food, and then retire quickly back into their refuge. They’re very retiring little ladies.

Minnesota is warming up, though. The snow is mostly gone, and I occasionally see jumping spiders sunning themselves, so I’m hoping to go hunting native spiders again soon.

He’s absolutely, utterly insane, and a danger to the world

I hope TACO Trump chickens out by 7pm Central time, but right now he’s blustering and posturing even more than usual.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. | don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Right. God bless the people of Iran while threatening to obliterate them. He’s either steeling his nerve to pull the trigger on an action that will make him even more of a criminal in the eyes of the civilized world, or he’s hoping for something revolutionarily wonderful to act as a pretext to back off. I don’t think he’s going to get one. Iran despises him, and by association, the rest of the United States, so I suspect they’re going to do nothing, in expectation that he’ll waste another few billion dollars in futile destruction.

I don’t know what will happen tonight, but one thing I do know: Iranian civilization will still exist tomorrow, and Trump will look like an impotent, hateful fool.

Are you relieved, Canada?

A biographer for Queen Elizabeth, John Hardin, recounts the story of his meeting with Donald Trump. Trump talked about annexing Canada, but backed off when it was explained that Canada still recognizes the king as head of state — he has a weird respect for royalty. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the same respect for history or the rule of law, because he still wants to redraw the US-Canada border.

After Hardman confirmed the British monarch remains Canada’s head of state, Trump went on to complain about Canada’s “terrible politicians.”

“They’re nice to my face and then they say bad things behind my back,” Trump told Hardman, who then writes the U.S. president noted a majority of Canadians live just above the Canada-U.S. border due to the cold weather in northern Canada.

“The problem is some guy drew that straight line to make a border,” Hardman says Trump told him. “He should just have drawn it 50 miles further north and then there wouldn’t be a problem.”

However, Hardman writes that Trump conceded redrawing that border would be a difficult task to achieve during his final term as president, and acknowledged Canada’s history and sovereignty.

“I suppose Canadians have got 200 years of history and all that, ‘Oh, Canada’ thing,” Trump told Hardman. “You can’t deal with that in three-and-a-half years. I guess it’s not going to happen!”

Come on, Canada. He just wants a 50 mile wide strip of Canada — there wouldn’t be a problem if he just took it over. He’s not going to do it because Canada has a king, and it’s too much trouble to take it in the remaining three years of his term. You can breathe a sigh of relief.

We can’t, here on the American side, because we’re still stuck with a fucking moron for a president.

Far, far away

Farther away than anyone has gone before.

The Orion spacecraft is now in the lunar sphere of influence, meaning the moon’s gravity has more pull on the vehicle than the Earth. At 1:57 p.m. ET, the crew surpassed the record for the farthest distance traveled from Earth by humans, which was set by the Apollo 13 mission at 248,655 statute miles from Earth. At 2:45 p.m., the crew will begin making observations of the surface of the moon during the flyby.

Pretty good. Fly on!

Dr Dunsworth is good at this

Holly Dunsworth is doing a page-by-page reading of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. She has more stamina than I do.

When that book came out, it got a lot of praise, so I picked a copy off the shelf at the bookstore and started browsing through it. I did not buy it, because I could see, just from skimming the first chapter that it was shallow trash written by someone with only a superficial knowledge of the subject. How did people fall for this? It was just another example of the enshittification of everything, in this case of evolutionary science.

She doesn’t hate the book, though. She’s just correcting all the petty and annoying mistakes in a book that, so far, is sort of generally true. That’s a useful service.

Personally, I couldn’t bear reading the book, but it’s worth reading the Dunsworth commentaries.

I’m in show business!

This past weekend, I was trained in the movie business. Our local theater is run as a co-op, I’m a member of the board, and I bravely volunteered to assist in occasionally assisting in running the theater. This meant going in to operate the projector and help with the concessions. Easy, right? Push a few buttons, relieve some of our helpful volunteers, no sweat.

Except it turns out to be a non-trivial exercise. The theater is an old building that has been clumsily revamped to handle a modern movie projection system. The first step is running around to various closets and hidey-holes to flip circuit breakers on, power up various computers and devices, gather up a pair of cash boxes and count money and deliver them to the ticket booth and concessions, and turn on the two projectors, and wait. These are run by old computers that take ages to start up and feature antique Windows software to run everything.

The projector software really does everything for you. It shows all the ads and movies on a tight schedule, and once it’s running you can just ignore the projection until the movie is done. That sounds great, but it’s more like the autopilot on a private plane. It does the job it’s designed to do, but before you can push the button to switch on the autopilot, you still have to do all the pre-flight checks and turn on the engine and get the plane down the runway and into the air. It’s much more complicated than I imagined.

So I’ve gone through the procedure once — it wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to do more run throughs under supervision before I can fly solo.

I didn’t have a chance to watch the movies. I was able to catch the end of The Bride, which was confusing and loud. The star of the weekend was Super Mario Galaxy, which was packing the house — we had a record attendance. I did learn the most of the money made is from concessions, which I’ll have to learn how to do next. This is the first time in my entire life that I’ve worked in retail, and I’m mystified by it.

But the glamor!