The movie this week: First Man

Oh, how I wanted to like this movie. I remember watching the moon landing in 1969. I had the mission profile memorized. I built the humongous Saturn V model, the one with the detachable stages and the lunar module you could dock with the command module. I had a larger scale lunar module on my bedroom dresser. I listened raptly to Walter Cronkite. This was my jam in the 1960s-70s.

That was a good thing, too, because this movie would have been incomprehensible without that background knowledge.

The story focuses (I used that word figuratively) on Neil Armstrong. Unfortunately, the story is told with lots and lots of closeups on Ryan Gosling’s face — we are apparently supposed to figure out what is going on from the expressions flickering across that face, and the faces of the other astronauts and engineers. It doesn’t work for a couple of reasons: 1) they’re all* playing stolid engineers who clearly don’t believe in emotions. Gosling in particular is a repressed robot who occasionally has to let a drop of lubricating fluid trickle out of his eye-holes. 2) We get no context, very few names, very little about the situation. Oh, hey, there’s another robo-astronaut whose name we don’t know, let’s try to guess who it is from the pattern of pores on his nose. 3) Except we can’t actually see those pores, because of the liberal use of shaky-cam. Blurry shaky cam. Sometimes the only action in a scene is the way the lens meanders in and out of focus while the camera wobbles about.

But…big rockets, you say. There must be some wonderful thrilling big-machine-flying-into-the-sky cinematography. Not really. The guy who made this movie seems to think we want an astronaut’s eye view of three Phillips-head screws holding a bracket to an interior wall vibrating wildly. I almost walked out a few times when the shaky-cam got so insane I was starting to feel nauseous.

You want to watch a movie about the space program? Go see Hidden Figures again, or The Right Stuff. They actually manage to tell interesting human stories, and focus the camera at the same time.

Except for Clare Foy, playing Armstrong’s wife, who does express the fact that she’s getting increasingly pissed off as the movie goes on. I identified a lot with her.

I think Peterson is cracking up

Sorry, buckos, it’s another comment on Jordan Peterson. But I think he’s losing it. He’s on a lengthy world tour and is posting delusional missives about his mental state.

So it’s 2:39 a.m. in Oslo, Norway. I woke up in a too-hot hotel room out of a fitful nightmare, which I can only partially remember. I haven’t had a dream that I could recall even that clearly in a very long period of time. The last one was about traveling and speaking and not getting enough to eat. That was about six months ago. It occurred just before I embarked on what has now been a nine-month, 85-city world tour. I am on a very restricted diet, eating only beef and water, as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease. I was concerned at some deep unconscious level about what might go wrong if I set out to talk with 250,000 people: If I could not eat, then I could not think and then things would not go well. Hence the nightmare. It was a warning of what might go wrong (and has not).

Has too.

I don’t remember my dreams very often, either, but when I do, they tend to be surreal and sort of playful (I’m one of those lucid dreamers). I don’t think I’ve ever had a violent dream about beating people up — maybe it’s because I eat a healthy diet — but it seems to be one of his themes.

In this dream I was speaking to a young man. He was very garrulous and irritating; he was unkempt, poorly put together, and he simply would not shut up. Everything he said was designed to provoke and to test. He finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance. I grabbed him, physically, and threw him against the wall. It was like wrestling with dough.

In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling.

You’d think a psychologist would be able to provide some insight into all this. But no. It was because he had a bad experience with a French journalist the day before. He was resentful because the journalist wouldn’t swallow the bullshit he peddles, so he had a dream about forcing him to accept what he said. His response is to dehumanize someone who disagreed with him.

I hadn’t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn’t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn’t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant. I had a shower, and we went for a steak, and we tried to put the episode behind us, as we must, under such conditions, when the next city and the next audience beckons, the very next day. But the part of me that lurks underneath, dreaming, still had something to say.

And that something was SHUT UP!, and also to regurgitate that NPC meme that’s making the rounds of the right-wing trolls.

He’s not holding up well under the strain of his diet and finding out that a lot of people can see right through him. Poor man.

Good news, bad news

All my life, I’ve had this dichotomy staring me in the face: my mother’s side of the family tends to live to a ripe old age, I knew my maternal great-grandparents, my grandmother lived on to old age despite a rough life, and my mother is still around (she may outlive me). On my father’s side, though, it’s like the grim reaper marks everyone for death as soon as they hit their fifties. My paternal grandfather died when my dad was a kid, my paternal grandmother died when I was 12, and my father died when he was younger than I am now. So I’ve always wondered which side of the family I was going to take after.

It turns out it doesn’t matter! There’s a new analysis of the genetics of human longevity with a gigantic data set.

Starting from 54 million subscriber-generated public family trees representing six billion ancestors, Ancestry removed redundant entries and those from people who were still living, stitching the remaining pedigrees together. Before sharing the data with the Calico research team, Ancestry stripped away all identifiable information from the pedigrees, leaving only the year of birth, year of death, place of birth (to the resolution of state within the US and country outside the US), and familial connections that make up the tree structure itself.

The SAP included almost 500 million individuals (with a single pedigree accounting for over 400 million people), largely Americans of European descent, each connected to another by either a parent-child or a spouse-spouse relationship. The scale of the data allowed the researchers to get accurate heritability estimates across different contexts; they could stratify the data by birth cohort or by sex or by other variables without losing the power needed for their analyses. They employed structural equation modeling—a technique that hasn’t often been applied to this problem due to the amount of data required for it to be productive—to calculate life span correlations and heritability across the giant pedigree.

Yadda yadda yadda. OK. I’m impressed with the methods. Now I want the answer: tell me my fortune, how long will I live? And the answer is…

By correcting for these effects of assortative mating, the new analysis found life span heritability is likely no more than seven percent, perhaps even lower.

The upshot? How long you live has less to do with your genes than you might think.

You can’t really tell from the genes. Environment and experience matter more.

This is good news: my paternal genetics aren’t a death sentence. But it’s also bad news: my maternal genetics don’t mean I can coast into my 90s. I have to try and replicate the life history of my maternal relatives.

Let’s see…

  • Live in a cold northern climate, like Minnesota. Check.
  • Eat more lutefisk.
    Uh, we might have a problem here.

Note: This result does not mean that genetics doesn’t matter. It means longevity is a complex, multifactorial trait, that many genes work in concert to allow for a long life, and that we inherit a mix of genes, some deleterious, some beneficial, such that you can’t easily estimate the role of the combinations you get from looking at your relatives. Also, as we all know, there is a huge environmental component: I could have the best suite of longevity genes, but if I start smoking cigars and drinking a quart of whisky every day while practicing a high wire act without a net, I may not last for long. There’s also a component of just simple chance.

So forget about genetic determinism. Just live the best life you can.

That’s not really very many scientists

Oh, look. We’re supposed to be impressed with All the Candidates With Science Backgrounds Who Just Got Elected. I condensed down the list; there are 21 with “science backgrounds” out of the 435 in the US House of Representatives, and when you look closely, the list has been padded quite a bit, mainly because journalists (and the general public) don’t have a very good idea of what science is.

  1. Lauren Underwood (D) Nursing and public health
  2. Joe Cunningham (D) Ocean engineer & attorney
  3. Elaine Luria (D) Nuclear engineer
  4. Chrissy Houlahan (D) Engineering degree
  5. Jacky Rosen (D) Bachelor’s in Psychology
  6. Sean Casten (D) Molecular biology and biochemistry
  7. Kim Schrier (D) Pediatrician
  8. Ami Bera (D) Clinical medicine
  9. Jerry McNerny (D) Mathematics, engineering
  10. Tony Cardenas (D) Electrical engineering
  11. Ted Lieu (D) Computer science
  12. Raul Ruiz (D) Medicine, public health
  13. Dan Lipinski (D) Mechanical engineering
  14. Brad Schneider (D) Industrial engineering
  15. Bill Foster (D) Physics
  16. Steve Watkins (R) Army engineer
  17. Martin Heinrich (D) Mechanical engineering
  18. Jeffrey Van Drew (D) Dentistry
  19. Paul Tonko (D) Mechanical engineering
  20. Chris Collins (R) Mechanical engineering
  21. Kevin Hern (R) Engineering

Not to disrespect them at all, but engineering and medicine are not science. It’s also hard to argue any more that any Republican is actually pro-science, given that the party is a deranged mob of science denialists right now.

So I’d actually say only four (in blue) actually have science backgrounds — the others have backgrounds more in applied science (Again, that’s not a bad thing at all). Foster and Casten in particular have advanced degrees in physics and biology, respectively, and have definitely earned the acknowledgment.

The others, though, are also important, because they’ll at least contribute to a more favorable attitude towards science in congress. But I don’t think it does them any favors to inflate their credentials or misrepresent them. Nursing and medicine and engineering and dentistry are all demanding and credible disciplines without pretending they’re something they’re not.

Jordan Peterson is a fool, Part I’ve-Lost-Track-Of-The-Number

You can’t do anything about global warming, he says. Might as well burn more coal, otherwise you’ll have to start burning trees. There’s nothing anyone can do to mitigate climate change.

There are more trees in the Northern Hemisphere* than there were 200 years ago, which says to me that we do have the power to enable changes in the environment. Where he goes off the rails is in implying that it would be worse to burn trees than to burn coal. Trees are a renewable resource. There is no net gain in atmospheric CO2 if you plant trees at a rate equal to or faster than the rate you burn them, while burning coal releases CO2 that has been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years.

No, you don’t have to turn off your heat (Minnesota, in the winter? No, thanks). But you can get your heat from renewable sources that don’t contribute to greenhouse gases. About a third of US electricity generation is from coal, another third from natural gas, and the other third is from renewables and nuclear power. We can shift that — in Germany, about half their power is generated from renewables and nuclear, so you can clearly work in that direction without compromising industry. One thing we could do is phase out new coal power plant construction and encourage more solar and wind power (and nuclear, maybe — although that’s guaranteed to start arguments among environmentalists). It’s going to take time, but it doesn’t help to have apologists for the fossil fuel industry advocating for giving up.

It also helps to set personal limits and long-term goals. That was the whole point of the Paris climate agreement, to set goals and provide practical guidance in meeting them. You know, the agreement our President* reneged on to keep his coal and oil friends happy.

And that Peterson guy has a packed house listening to him babble garbage.

*You should ask yourself, what about the Southern Hemisphere? Why doesn’t he say anything about that? Aren’t most of the planet’s trees in the tropics? Asking us to pay attention to a success story on the fringe while ignoring a net loss of 10 billion trees per year in the core is a classic right-wing distraction tactic.

I failed at jury duty again

I got called up again to participate in jury selection today. I almost made it on to a jury — I was on the last panel before the final selection. And then the prosecutor started asking questions.

“What 3 things come to mind when you think about law enforcement?” He asked a few people. They said various platitudes, like “protect and serve”, “help the community”, etc. Buncha timid suck-ups. Then he asked that anyone who held a different opinion should raise their hand … which I did, because I was going to answer honestly. And I said some combination of words like “avoid”, “mistrust”, and “bias”. Later he asked the panel in general about the legal system as a whole, and got more affirmative nods and comments, and he zoomed in on me and asked my opinion, and I made some flippant remark about how it might be OK as long as this case wasn’t going to the Supreme Court.

This was a sexual assault case, by the way.

Thus endeth my opportunity to participate in the courts system.

Don’t look at me that way. How can anyone answer that kind of question without serious reservations in the state where Philando Castile was murdered?

Oh, you want air? And water?

There’s a federal court case, Juliana v. United States, in the works in which the plaintiffs argue that the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness obligates the government to maintain a sustainable, livable atmosphere — or, at least, support legislation in good faith that limits how much we can poison it. That sounds like a good idea to me.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

How can you argue against that? The Trump administration has a simple defense.

By contrast, the US Department of Justice argues that there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’ — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

That is not the answer I expected. Hemming and hawing about the practicality of limiting greenhouse gasses, sure; endless lying about whether climate change is a temporary phase, or about the desirability of warming up the planet by a few degrees, or claiming that we might be getting a little warmer, but there is no threat to our existence…I could imagine all that coming out of Republicans in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

But to announce that they feel no compulsion to provide an environment compatible with life? That’s a new one.

A bad day in the spider lab

I had such high hopes this morning — necessary reagent had arrived, I had a nice egg sac, I was going to open it up and spend my afternoon exploring embryos. It was not to be. I teased apart the egg sac, and what do I find? Heartbreak. Disappointment. Failure.

The eggs were all dead. I’m not sure what happened here, but I have a hypothesis: this summer and early fall, I had all these fish tanks in the lab, gurgling away, and the place was pretty humid. Now those are shut down, and it’s winter in Minnesota, when the air dries out. Spiders like some degree of humidity, and I’ve been maintaining that by regularly misting their vials with an atomizer, but maybe that’s not enough for the embryos.

So I’m cranking up the moisture levels in the incubator. Now I’ve got to worry about balancing everything — too much and I’ll have to worry about mold and fungus.

Babies are such fussy little creatures.