If you’re not an activist, you must be a do-nothing passivist

A True Scientist is supposed to be aloof, objective, dispassionate, and unemotional. This isn’t just a stereotype, it’s part of a set of social mores that are imposed on individuals who belong to this community of scientists.

And yet, at the same time, we’re part of a larger society that sometimes has serious problems that scientists are among the first to see. Should climate scientists be dispassionate about global climate change? Should medical doctors be unemotional about dishonest tobacco advertisements? The best scientists I’ve known have also had causes: for instance, George Streisinger, the fellow who started this whole business of zebrafish as a model system, was also a peace activist who was very concerned about nuclear war.

So when Shiv writes about the use of the word “activist” to demean scientists, I know exactly where that’s coming from. I’ve seen it way too many times.

Being an activist means you are aware and working to change the world. There’s nothing in that that implies you are cavalier with the evidence — often, it means you are acutely conscious of the facts, and passionate about the truth.

If you see something, say something

Nazia and Faisal Ali were flying home from a vacation in Paris, when…I think from their names you can guess what happened. They didn’t make it home that day.

A flight crew member had complained to the pilot that she was uncomfortable with the Muslim couple in the second row of economy class. The woman was wearing a head scarf and using a phone, and the man was sweating, she allegedly told the pilot.

The pilot contacted the ground crew. He would not take off until couple was removed.

The flight attendant also heard her use the word “Allah”. Very suspicious. Of course they were kicked off the flight…they were prolly terrissssts. Because they were brown.

Or maybe this is who they are.

Faisal and Nazia Ali, both of whom emigrated to the United States with their respective families from Pakistan, became U.S. citizens 16 years ago. They are parents of three sons, ages 5, 4 and 2. He is 36 and works as director of operations for Healing Touch, a home health care company that he owns with his father and brother. He has a degree from the University of Cincinnati. She attended Wright State University. They worship at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati in West Chester Township.

Delta Airlines has their own spin.

The Delta statement reads: “Delta condemns discrimination toward our customers in regards to age, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or gender. As a global airline that brings hundreds of thousands of people together every day, Delta is deeply committed to treating all of our customers with respect. Delta continues its investigation into this matter and will issue a full refund of these customers’ airfare.”

No. This was bigotry, plain and simple, and the flight crew, the ground crew, and the French police colluded happily to discriminate against someone on the basis of nothing but bias and air.

Imagine if, in the spirit of “If you see something, say something”, I were on a plane, and I waved over a flight attendant, and whispered, “That 20-something white guy in 9C makes me uncomfortable. I heard him say ‘Jesus’ on his cell phone, and he looks nervous and sweaty.” Would they kick him off the plane?

I don’t think so. White people in America are assumed innocent, while brown ones are always suspect.

I hope, at least, the cost of an overnight hotel stay and a flight from Paris to Cincinnati were deducted from the pay of the falsely suspicious flight crew member.

It works both ways

Martin Shkreli, the repellent pharma-bro, is now publicly diagnosing Hillary Clinton with Parkinson’s Disease.

He has no qualifications at all for offering medical advice.

Shkreli dropped out of high school his senior year but graduated because he had the necessary credits and got his bachelor’s degree in business administration, not medicine, from Baruch College in 2004. He did not go to medical school.

Yet he has a video that’s over 2 hours long in which he meanders on about this.

If you find this as revolting and inappropriate as I do, I’ll just mention…do you feel the same way about all the non-psychiatrists claiming that Donald Trump, or his mobs of cheering fans, are mentally ill?

Don’t be like Martin Shkreli.

Ray Comfort can’t even keep the question straight

Ray Comfort has this new cheesy “movie” in which he claims he destroys atheism with one scientific question — which reviews revealed was where did the DNA molecule come from? I explained that that was not very challenging and was actually a rather stupid question. But now he’s got new ads out that present a completely different question.

A thought-provoking question to ask an atheist is whether or not he thinks that his brain was intelligently designed.

No.

Well, that didn’t provoke much thought now, did it? All I have to do is look at Ray Comfort, who has the same kind of brain I have, and it’s obvious that if it were designed at all, it was done badly. Alternatively, I could look at a chimpanzee and see that its brain is smaller but otherwise very similar to mine, and it’s obvious that we have a modified generic ape brain, which is a kind of mammalian brain, which has all the hallmarks of a standard vertebrate brain.

If the whole premise of his movie is that he’s got this killer question that will rock atheists back on their heels, why is it that every question that’s leaking out of it is just kind of pathetic? Doesn’t he try out his question on informed subjects to see how they really react to it before he builds an entire movie that claims he has some kind of potent approach?

Minnesotans! You have an election on Tuesday! Vote!

Go to the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State to get a sample ballot. Then show up and vote on Tuesday. I want to see a good turnout by responsible citizens on an election that is not presidential. You’ve got to build a collection of people working for your causes at all levels, and stop expecting that you’ll put a magic person in place at the top of the pyramid and make everything work.

And I will unabashedly recommend that if you really despise Trump, you have to vote a straight Democratic ticket. I’m holding my nose and voting for Collin Peterson, Blue Dog Democrat, for the first time ever in this election, despite not liking him at all. Note to all you Stein/Johnson fans: another strike against them is that most of us won’t even find a Green/Libertarian candidate to vote for or against in these lower level elections.

In addition to local representatives, we’re voting on a Minnesota supreme court judge position. We get to choose between 3 people running for the job. Foss, a guy who wants to be a supreme court judge because, as he admits, he can’t find a job; MacDonald, who was endorsed by the state Republican party and lost her last election because she was caught driving while drunk; and Natalie Hudson, the incumbent and a Mark Dayton appointee, who is the only one with experience as a judge.

You might want to vote for the qualified candidate, Hudson.

Go find out who your candidates are and be sure to get out there and vote.

I will be nagging you again on Tuesday, Minnesotans.

The sad little #seriousacademic

By now, probably everyone has read that strange moan of anxiety about social media titled “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer” — or at least, if you’re an academic who enjoys a good eye-roll over someone with a massive 2×4 rammed up his butt, you’ve read it. It’s the one where an anonymous young Ph.D. student whines about people on Twitter or taking selfies or using instagram or writing blogs…in an anonymous blog post. They make a lot of silly complaints about people using hashtags at conferences and how the powers-that-be keep telling them how important their social media presence is to their career (which is really weird: my experience has been that administrators dread the fact that professors are speaking publicly about their experiences at their institution, and would love to be able to bottle that genie back up). There has been a flood of rebuttals to the fundamental wrongness of the “serious academic”, and I’ll just mention The Tattooed Professor, Meny Snoweballes, and Dean Burnett as good examples.

I want to take a different tack. I feel for this person.

It’s a really tough time to be a starting academic — it’s always a tough time. We get so many demands. Publish. Publish lots. Write grants. Write many grants, because almost all of them will be rejected. Teach. Every course is a challenge, and some of us have to teach multiple courses per term. Serve on committees. Attend meetings. Review papers. Dance, monkey, dance, or you’ll never get an academic job (you probably won’t anyway), you’ll never get tenure, you’ll never get promoted.

And then all those voluble assholes on the internet are adding pressure to tweet or write blogs or get out of the lab and talk to the public? Oh, hell no. Let me just fill up my lab notebook with numbers and gel photos and data, and pay me to do that. I’m running as fast as I can to just keep up without throwing these damned social obligations on my back.

I sympathize. Really, I do. There are lots of things I don’t like about my job (die, committee meetings, die), but I’m obligated to do them, so I do them. No matter what your job, there are always inevitable requirements to occasionally shovel out the stables. Academia in particular is rife with an excess of expectations, and everyone knows it.

But the first thing I have to point out is that social media isn’t one of them. You won’t get tenure for your Twitter activity, and in fact there is an academic bias against outreach and social activity and public engagement. “Serious academic’s” bleat is less an act of rebellion than a performative act of solidarity with staid traditional academics. It’s a person looking in terror at the chaos and uncertainty ahead of them in academia, and picking what they think is the side of the establishment…and they aren’t even certain that that is the right side to pick, witness the fact that their essay is anonymous.

But the most important thing I have to say is that they’re doing it wrong. They’re focusing on the obstacles and forgetting about the purpose. Nobody goes into academia for a love of grant writing and committee meetings. We don’t even go into it over the thrilling prospect of tweeting to a conference hashtag.

We go into it for the joy of the discipline. Remember that?

Personally, I signed on to this life because of some great experiences in science. I was lucky and was employed in a lot of extracurricular science stuff through college, and it was that that was more influential than my classes, I’m sad to say. I was doing animal care and assisting in animal surgeries in the department of physiology and biophysics — lowering electrodes into a living brain was enthralling. I worked with Johnny Palka on fly pupae, watching nerves grow into the developing wing. I did mouse brain histology in the psychology department with Geoff Clarke. I was Golgi staining fetal tissue with Jenny Lund and counting dendritic spines. These were the events that convinced me that I wanted to do more.

I went off to graduate school with Chuck Kimmel and discovered zebrafish embryos. Do you people even know how beautiful an embryo is? Exploring how cells behave in the complex environment of the organism is what kept me going.

Very serious academics

Very serious academics

I did a post-doc with Mike Bastiani and saw that grasshopper embryos are just as beautiful.

Then my first job at Temple University, where I had teaching obligations for the first time, showed me that I really enjoyed teaching. So I’ve followed that star, too. It all works. At every step, pursue the joy, while never forgetting to also do the duties. Some people don’t enjoy the teaching, so they focus more on the research. Some people, believe it or not, have a talent for management, so they move into administration, or into running large labs.

And some people write books. Or make videos. Or compose music or poetry about esoteric subjects. Or write blogs. It’s all good. You don’t have to do it all. You just have to always keep your attention focused on what brings you to your bliss.

Don’t let other people tell you what you must do with your life, and avoid the temptation to lecture others on what is the one, true, proper way to be an academic. If you find deep satisfaction in grinding out data, do it. If you enjoy teaching, do it. If you enjoy communicating to the public about that weird stuff you’re doing, do it.

I feel sad for “Serious Academic”. So young, and so certain of the one true path for all. He reminds me of someone.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

Try being the “Joyful Academic” for a while. It can be hard, especially in the current climate, but if nothing else, being true to yourself is more rewarding than trying to be true to someone else’s ideal.

Any story of Kent Hovind needs more Nazi imagery

RationalWiki has an expanded front-page feature on Kent Hovind, and it’s pretty thorough — I learned a few new things. I hadn’t known that he claims to have four doctorates, and it has a good breakdown of several examples of his bad math. However…

Does it feature any apocalyptic imagery? No.

How many times does it mention Hitler? Only once.

Does it have a doom-laden industrial soundtrack? Nope.

Sorry, RationalWiki, but you are hampered by that “rational” thing. When you’re talking about Kent Hovind, you need to bring the gold-plated stupid to the fore. Kent knows this. Kent knows how best to summarize his life: with lies and screeching and threats of imminent destruction.

Like in his trailer for a possible “documentary” that Creation Science Evangelism is making (warning: grisly scenes of death and corpses, and truly over-the-top Godwining).

That is so metal.

I notice, though, that for all of his Hitler-howling, most of the trailer is somehow about how he was an innocent man thrown into prison for blamelessly preaching the Gospel, rather than mentioning that he was really imprisoned for blatant tax evasion. C’mon, Kent, own your badassery: you were arrested for defying those Satanic tax accountants. You can’t simultaneously claim to be be a brave rebel while hiding behind claims of pious innocence.

Also, the title needs work: An Atheist’s Worse Nightmare? Seriously, Kent, comparing yourself to a banana is so wimpy.

I do feel a lot of sympathy for the RationalWiki crew, though. Imagine if this Hovind “documentary” ever actually happens — the fact-checking will be exhausting. It’s going to be measured in errors/second, or lies/second.

By golly, Trump is negging us!

The slimy orange turd is actually going to be speaking in Minnesota on 19 August — he must be really confident if he’s bothering to campaign in a state that’s practically guaranteed to vote for anybody but Trump — and he’s warming us up with trash talk.

So the Washington Times reported, of a Somali refugee program in Minnesota, that, “the effort to resettle large groups of Somali refugees, is having the unintended consequence of creating an enclave of immigrants with high unemployment, that is both stressing the state’s” — I mean, the state is having tremendous problems, its safety net — “and creating a rich pool of recruiting targets for Islamist terror groups.”

…

It’s hapenning. It’s happening. You see it, and you read about it. You see it. And you can be smart, and you can be cunning, and tough, or you can be very, very dumb, and not want to see what’s going on, folks.”

I don’t think he knows us at all well, which is another reason he’s going to lose here. The City Pages dismantles his claim that we have tremendous problems.

Here, Trump is referring to the terrible scourge of unemployment in the Twin Cities, where, as of June, the unemployment rate was all of 3.7 percent, second lowest among American metropolitan areas. Statewide, the jobless rate is 3.8 percent, tied for the eighth-best in the country.

As for the “tremendous problems” for our safety net, let’s compare Minnesota to Maine, where Trump was speaking. Maine, with 1.3 million people, has about one-fourth of Minnesota’s population (roughly 5.4 million, give-or-take a few hundred people in town claiming to be relatives of Prince.) Maine finished its budget year with a $93 million surplus. Minnesota entered the 2016 legislative session with a $900 million surplus. Four times the population, ten times the leftover money. A tremendous problem.

That same Washington Times story Trump cited faults Minnesota for spending more than all but one other state (Alaska) on social welfare, according to the local conservative think thank, the Center for the American Experiment. That study found Minnesota spent $4,000 more per-low income person than the average American state.

Leave it to conservatives to believe that spending more on the poor is a black mark against the state, or to assume that Somali is synonymous with terrorist.

I’d love to attend for the frisson of horror, but unfortunately, Trump is charging $1000 a person just to attend, and is looking for $100,000 donations from couples. Somehow, I don’t think attendance will reflect the political preferences of the state at all.

In other important Trump news, it is now an established scientific fact that he has tiny little hands.