A guilty pleasure

Sometimes, I’ll tune in to these atheist phone line shows on YouTube. It’s unfair, but it’s always the worst, dumbest, most ignorant Christians who call in to air their idiotic views publicly — maybe there are intelligent Christians out there, but they don’t call in to get skewered by atheists who know the Bible better than they do. Also, I enjoy hearing Matt shout, “SHUT THE FUCK UP” to some babbling ninny who can’t answer a simple question and chooses to instead try and overwhelm everyone with frenzied bullshit.

For example, this video titled “From Biblical Slavery to Alien DNA – Nebraska Steve Takes Us on Another Trip” is a good example of the genre. First the guy tries to say the Bible doesn’t endorse slavery, only to be trounced by the hosts reciting Bible verses at him. Then he segues to claiming there is evidence for God, although he can’t say what it was, in spite of repeated requests from the hosts to explain what that evidence was.

He did finally gasp out that “the WOW signal” is evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In case you don’t know, here’s is the WOW signal.

In 1977, an astronomer named Jerry Ehrman was recording radio transmissions from space, and got a brief, strong signal that he didn’t understand, so he scribbled “Wow!” on the printout. I’ve seen this cited so often by so many people as a sign that aliens are out there.

It’s not. The observation has been repeated. It’s noise from a passing comet.

The explanation started to come into focus last year when a team at the CPS suggested that the signal might have come from a hydrogen cloud accompanying a comet—additionally, the movement of the comet would explain why the signal was not seen again. The team noted that two comets had been in the same part of the sky that the Big Ear was monitoring on the fateful day. Those comets, P/2008 Y2(Gibbs) and 266/P Christensen had not yet been discovered. The team then got a chance to test their idea as the two comets appeared once again in the night sky from November 2016 through February of 2017.

The team reports that radio signals from 266/P Christensen matched those from the Wow! signal 40 years ago. To verify their results, they tested readings from three other comets, as well, and found similar results. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot say with certainty that the Wow! signal was generated by 266/P Christensen, but they can say with relative assurance that it was generated by a comet.

Somehow, I don’t think Nebraska Steve would care.

What would you tell people who want to gut basic research?

In 1997, Arthur Kornberg wrote an article for the Nobel Foundation, Basic research, the lifeline of medicine. It’s a good read.

The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered. Though it seemed unreasonable and impractical, counterintuitive even to scientists, to solve an urgent problem of disease by exploring apparently unrelated questions in biology, chemistry and physics, these basic studies proved time and again to be utterly practical and cost-effective.

Then he goes on to give the examples of x-rays, penicillin, polio vaccine and genetic engineering.

The lessons to be learned from these four histories and so many others should be crystal clear. No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft. As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use, only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends. Curiosity led to the inventions that became the source of industrial strength. It is imperative for a nation, a culture, a university and a company to understand the nature of the creative process and to encourage its support.

It’s too bad that we have a government that rejects this idea.

Reminder: the Stand up for science rally is taking place next week. The St Paul rally is from 3-5pm on Friday at the state capitol — I’ll be there.

I’m going to have to make a sign this weekend. Any suggestions for what I can put on it? I’m not going to put a copy of Kornberg’s paper on it — I need something short, pithy, and catchy.

A spider with two hoo-has

Nice.

Almafuerte peripampasica, female. A, prosoma and opisthosoma (dorsal view). B, opisthosoma (ventral view, arrow pointing to the duplicated epigyne). Note the difference in size and the slightly asymmetry. C, normal epigyne (arrow pointing to larva). D, duplicated epigyne. Specimen locality: Argentina: Córdoba: Parque Nacional Quebrada del Condorito, “sitio 2”, -31.63481, -64.71087, alt. 1846m, M. Izquierdo, D. Abregú, C. Mattoni, col. Sep. 16, 2019, under stones. LABRE-Ar 498, voucher MAI-4754.

Developmental variations always catch my eye, and this one is interesting from the standpoint of looking for spatial specifications. The normal blueprint for the spider body plan puts the epigyne at the anterior end of the abdomen, but here’s one way back near the spinnerets. What triggered formation at that position? It’s also non-functional, they think — I’d want to know more about the internal organs, what’s connected to what.

In general, malformations in spiders involve chelicerae, pedipalps, walking legs, and eyes, but those affecting female reproductive structures are not so frequent. A teratological case of a spider with a duplicated reproductive structure is described. The female specimen has the typical epigyne and a second one near the spinnerets. The second epigyne is less developed and seems to be non-functional. Similar malformations have been reported for Amaurobiidae and Salticidae, and here is presented for Gnaphosidae. Although it is widely known that temperature and humidity may induce abnormalities under experimental conditions, the causes behind teratological genitalia in wild females are unknown. This case opens the question of the origin of such a malformation and the ontogeny of female reproductive organs in spiders.

Also, that’s an adult of respectable size, so the ectopic organ doesn’t seem to have affected its viability. I’m going to have to spend some time looking up spiders’ skirts this summer.

Remembering my grandmother

Dang, these people look so happy.

Those are our kids, Alaric, Skatje, and Connlann (l-r) and their Great-Grandma Westad. Of course they’re happy — the kids are thrilled to be on vacation and hanging out with their favorite great-grandma, and great-grandma was always so excited to see them. This was probably the early 1990s, when we were living in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we didn’t get up to Washington state often enough. I found this photo in a pile and it reminded me of how much she loved to see her great-grandkids. She’d usually take them out to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, or to Arby’s. She practically lived on Arby’s roast beef sandwiches, buying them in bulk and freezing them, and thawing them out for her dinner. Poor, you know, although she owned that house in the background. I think her greatest joy was her grandkids and great-grandkids.

She also had a yard full of flowers. Way back when I was dating my wife to be, she’d cut flowers and tell me I had to bring them to her — she was always telling me I had to marry that girl. I was happy to obey.

Unfortunately, these notices were also in the pile.

I wish I’d visited her a few more times before it was too late.

These people are certifiable

Once you get sucked down into the gender critical maelstrom, you are doomed. You start off whining about men cheating in women’s sports competitions, and next thing you know, your brain is as rotten as Chris Rufo’s.

There is a battalion of male-to-female transgenders within the American intelligence apparatus. They hate Italians and LibsofTikTok. They fantasize about pseudo-vaginas and butthole lazers. They are in charge of the most sophisticated spying machine in human history.

Battalions of spies hating Italians with their butthole lazers? What? The only sane thing he wrote was about hating LibsofTikTok.

The entire right-wing is infected with some kind of dementia.

Informative! What wealthy universities can’t do

Look at all the money these universities keep in their endowments! Why do they need federal grant money at all?

Harvard is sitting on a dragon’s hoard of $52 billion, amounting to over $2 million per student. Why do they even charge tuition? Why should the federal government subsidize research at an institution already rolling in money?

Here’s a very good answer.

Despite the common terminology, there is not “an endowment” at universities large or small. The endowment is not a single pool of money, waiting to be used for whatever purpose the university deems fit, such as financial emergencies. In reality, the endowment is a collection of thousands of funds representing gifts from particular donors with a legal agreement attached. These gifts are generally for something specific: scholarships, support for a named department or center, or research on a particular disease. Moreover, the principal of the endowment can’t legally be spent down. A condition of the gift is that it is held to generate future income.

Harvard is a very old university and you could argue that their endowment is the product of inherited wealth — the rich get richer year after year. But they can’t touch the core endowment, only the profits generated by it, and even some of that gets reinvested in the endowment, where it’s locked away forever.

The article looks at a newer university, the University of Michigan, with it’s $19 billion endowment.

Let’s take the University of Michigan, where I work, as an example. It has one of the largest public university endowments, at $19.2 billion. Roughly three-quarters is legally restricted for specific purposes established by donors. Distributions from the endowment are spent in a variety of areas, with 28% going to student financial aid—sometimes quite generally, sometimes for very specific awards—25% to patient care at the hospital, and 15% to research. So while the unrestricted portion of the endowment does allow some room for maneuvering, most of “the endowment” cannot just be redirected to compensate for a reduction in NIH support for overhead costs or other federal cuts. Michigan estimates that the proposed change in NIH funding would create a $181 million annual hole in its budget. The endowment might help cover some of those costs in the short run, but it cannot fill the hole.

My alma mater didn’t make the list — the University of Washington endowment is “only” $5.5 billion, while the University of Oregon has $1.6 billion. The University of Minnesota has $5.9 billion. None of that money can be redirected to cover indirect costs, by law.

And how much money are these universities going to lose by the savage beancounters who plan to slash indirect costs to 15%?

Ouch. The UW is going to have an $86 million shortfall. All the major research universities are looking at budget cuts on the order of $100 million. Where’s that money going to come from? Not their endowments, we already determined that. Not from state funding — we’re all operating on shoestrings there already.

I guess in the process of destroying the federal government, American education and scientific research are going to be collateral damage.

It’s all about wrecking things

Yesterday, I was wondering what Elon Musk would do with 3 million emails describing what every federal worker did last week. We didn’t have to wait long, we now know what the plan was.

Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.

The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.

Nice. Big Brother AI is going to analyze your email to determine whether you should be fired or not.

Trump & Musk don’t care what you write. They’re looking for pretexts to dismantle the federal government.

I think that there might be other forces that kill my favorite YouTube channels

I feel somewhat uneasy about the message in this video: it’s the idea that YouTube channels that have high production costs that need to be subsidized by organizations like NSF are in danger.

It’s true. We risk losing high quality stuff, while keeping right-wing subsidized garbage (like PragerU) and we don’t want that. So in that sense I agree 100% with the message.

But there’s a greater danger, and it’s been here all along. It’s the YouTube algorithm, which is already designed to favor clickbait, rage content, and sensationalist lies. The most heavily viewed YT pages are obscenities, not in the sexual sense, but in an intellectual sense. PewDiePie, MrBeast, Tim Poole, and a nightmarish swarm of repetitive, AI-generated children’s cartoon channels — the current is flowing strongly against science media.

I don’t think funding from NASA or NSF or local universities to do science outreach, which is a good thing, is going to be able to succeed against the biases of corporate YouTube. But keep on trying!

My senator is doing the work

Tina Smith, one of our Minnesota senators, has announced that she won’t be running for another term, unfortunately. Or is that good? Can we get some young progressive DFL radical to fill her position? But as she enters the final leg of her term, she’s fighting back.

@SenTinaSmith: This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.
[Musk orders all federal employees to respond to an email]
@SenTinaSmith: I bet a lot of people had an experience like this with a bad boss — there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, “Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else.”
I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.

Bravo! Keep resisting!

This is an easy one to fight, at least. The order from Elon Musk is an ultimatum, sent out by someone with no official authority. It’s an incredibly stupid email.

With the subject line What did you do last week? the email demanded that every recipient reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. It then reassuringly instructed employees, do not send [emphasis Musk’s, I mean OPM’s, or whatever] any classified information, links, or attachments and finished with a deadline of this Monday at 11:59pmEST which was for some very phishy reason hyperlinked.

I am not averse to accountability — I just got an email from my division chair informing me that it’ll be time form my yearly review of what I’ve been up to, and that’s fine. I expect my local administrator to want to be aware of all faculty activity, and to file away that information as a record of my responsibilities. But she has the authority and responsibility (and, by the way, was elected by the faculty to perform that role). Anyone could send me an email demanding that I list what I did last week, but I get to laugh and click delete.

But this…this is madness. The Department of Government Efficiency thinks the way to enhance that efficiency is to demand that all employees file a list of what they did last week to some random email address? Last week…are they going to make this part of the weekly routine? What are they going to do with it? And just five?

OK, I’m not a federal employee, but here’s my list:

  • Fed the spiders
  • Cleaned the spider cages
  • Fed the spiders again
  • Turned over the mealworm substrate
  • Repaired some spider silk frames

Those are probably the least significant, least time-consuming tasks I did last week, so I can fulfill the letter of the request while not informing them of anything important that I accomplished.

What baffles me, though, is that the US has roughly 3 million federal employees. What will they do with 3 million emails pouring in to Musk’s office? The link above has an idea: they’re just going to shovel them all into an AI as training data, and possibly to search for fireable statements.

Actually, the best kind of response is like this one, from the department of defense.

DoD personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information. The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures. When and if required, the Department will coordinate responses to the email you have received from OPM. For now, please pause any response to the OPM email titled “What did you do last week.”

That’s right. Just ignore the spam email.

I do wonder if Darin S. Selnick still has his job.

Here’s a different kind of reaction from a Democrat:

Good god, we have to get rid of these geriatric do-nothings in the Democratic party. By the way, Gerry Connolly was chosen by house democrats over AOC to chair the oversight committee.

This is why Democrats lose.