At least I’m not the oldest and fartiest old fart around

This philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has a remarkably pessimistic view of the future of academia. He has written a requiem for the students — as if they’re all dead now — because we’re using online teaching.

As we foresaw they would, university lessons next year will be held online [in English]. What was evident to careful observers — namely, that the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies — is being duly realized.

We are not so much interested here in the consequent transformation of teaching, in which the element of physical presence (always so important in the relationship between students and teachers) disappears definitively, as we are in the disappearance of group discussion in seminars, which was the liveliest part of instruction. Part of the technological barbarism that we are currently living through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen.

Actually, I don’t yet know how university classes will be held next year. We’re tentatively hoping that we’ll have some measure of normality restored, and are planning as if we’ll have students on campus in the fall, but we also have contingency plans in the works in case we’re only partially open, or have to close the campus after starting, or who knows what. This is also not a “so-called pandemic”, it’s an actual pandemic. We have to respond appropriately to a serious disease, because what’s most important is the health and safety of our students. Most of us aren’t particularly interested in having these young men and women sit at our feet and worship our words of wisdom, especially when it puts their lives at risk.

I’d rather go back to the old, comfortable, in-person methods of teaching, and it’s true that we’ve lost something when we have to do everything online. But he’s wrong about some things: I didn’t find that group discussion suffered particularly. The hard part for me was the asynchronous lecturing — losing the immediate feedback from having an audience, and not being able to punctuate an explanation with an opportunity to put students to work applying the methods. It took me a few weeks to get into the swing of it all, but near the end I was getting some very good group discussions going on Zoom. You just have to learn to use the medium. You, the teacher, have to adapt and change. I read Giorgio’s whine, and he sounds like a guy who doesn’t want to learn anything new, and is very good at inventing pompous excuses.

Some things are highly unsatisfactory when translated to the screen — lab work in particular is pretty much impossible to do well. I want to see that restored as soon as possible, but other bits don’t suffer much at all. Philosophy, for instance, ought to be eminently teachable through a “spectral screen”. Bodies are just another kind of meat robot holding the brains we want to reach, after all.

At first, Giorgio just sounds like a cranky old person who doesn’t want to do anything new. But reading further, I had to conclude he’s just a loon. His conclusion is stunningly out of touch.

1. Professors who agree — as they are doing en masse — to submit to the new dictatorship of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime. As happened then, it is likely that only fifteen out of a thousand will refuse, but their names will surely be remembered alongside those of the fifteen who did not take the oath.

Whoa. Reluctantly accepting constraints on our familiar methodology for the sake of our students’ health is the equivalent of fascism? We’ve got students who want to learn, and compromising in our approach is not surrendering to the dictatorship of the ‘spectral screen’. It’s persevering in the face of adversity to do everything we can to educate people.

But then, this is a guy who thinks the pandemic is “so-called” and is a bit out of touch with reality. Does he need a few students to die before he wakes up to the cost of his intransigence?

2. Students who truly love to study will have to refuse to enroll in universities transformed in this way, and, as in the beginning, constitute themselves in new universitates, only within which, in the face of technological barbarism, the word of the past might remain alive and something like a new culture be born — if it will be born.

It’s not “technological barbarism”, it’s a tool for communication. That’s what teaching is about.

I don’t think that encouraging students to gather in large groups to give old farts the ability to engage with them in the traditional way is safe or sensible. We’re all looking forward to the day medical treatments restore our universities to their familiar modes of operation, but until then, respect the health of our communities and fire up the damned Zoom thingie. Make do. Try new approaches. Show a little flexibility.

The Panspermia Mafia strikes again!

A reader informed me that I was mentioned in a British magazine, and sent me a scan of the relevant bit. It’s not so much my brief mention that interested me, as that it’s another example of the Panspermia Mafia in action. It’s an article about a recently elected Conservative MP, Jamie Wallis, who has a science degree…or does he?

Dominic Cummings has bemoaned the fact that many MPs “did degrees such as English, history, and PPE. They operate with…little maths or science.” Thankfully, Dr Jamie Wallis, the new Conservative MP for Bridgend, is that rarest of things: an MP with not just a science degree, but a PhD in “astrobiology” to boot.

Where it gets interesting is that he obtained a PhD from, I presume, Cardiff University, which was NC Wickramasinghe’s former affiliation, although he has since ensconced himself at the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. There is reason to doubt that Wallis actually did the caliber of work we expect in a PhD thesis.

Completing a PhD while co-directing several companies is quite an achievement. Wallis’s thesis, “Evidence of Panspermia: From Astronomy to Meteorites”, is devoted to the niche and widely rejected theories of his supervisor, one NC Wickramasinghe. Notoriously, Wickramasinghe maintains not only that life on earth arrived on comets, but that organisms continue to regularly arrive by this method. (Just last week, he wrote to the Lancet helpfully suggesting the novel coronavirus COVID-19 arrived in China from space.)

Why does the Lancet, or any respectable journal, continue to publish crank letters from Wickramasinghe? But OK, I think it’s established that Wallis’s degree was somehow earned under the supervision of a well-known fringe kook, and that it’s questionable how much work he actually invested in the project, which sounds like some kind of review involving no independent research.

But why do I call this the Panspermia Mafia? They use their connections to promote a small family of fellow travelers.

Appropriately, given that the theory of cosmic panspermia is about origins, involvement with Wickramasinghe seems to be a Wallis family affair. A typical thesis might produce several publications. Wallis Jnr’s thesis lists an astonishing 21 with him as an author — mostly not in peer-reviewed journals — 16 of which include his dad in the author list. And of the eight publications that supposedly have been peer-reviewed, six are in the highly dubious Journal of Cosmology. Wickramasinghe is the “executive editor” for astrobiology for the journal, described by US scientist PZ Myers as the “ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics”.

Yeah, that’s about it — it’s so inbred that it relies on the one guy who has a name and connections but very little credibility, Wickramasinghe, to promote the members of his cabal in a roster of fake journals. This article didn’t examine them in detail, but I suspect that all 21 of the articles are rehashed, recycled, barely rewritten examples of frantic self-plagiarism. To say you got a degree with Wickramasinghe is the British equivalent of saying you’re a colleague of Kent Hovind.

Isn’t it nice that he provides a pipeline for Conservatives to claim they have the authority of science? Just in case you’re wondering, no, they don’t.

The nicest grocery store in the universe

I want to shop here now.

A problematic customer walks up to a store with a clearly marked policy that you must wear a mask, and everyone cheerfully informs her of everything they can do to help her: they can get her whatever she wants (she refuses, she claims she needs “personal things”, which is silly since she has to inform the store about what she’s buying when she checks out), that they can take her credit card and pay for it for her (she objects that they’d get her financial info, which they do every time she swipes the card herself anyway), yet she just generally makes an ass of herself…and the staff are as obliging as they can be. Stores should use this as a training video for how to deal with a bad customer.

The woman’s name is Shelley Lewis, and she suffers from a severe case of entitled dumbassery.

Heavy.com catalogued the Twitter background checks that began popping up Sunday about Lewis, who seems from her Facebook presence to be a real prize.

Among the topics of conversation are some conspiracy crazy greatest hits, including 5G towers, 9/11, fake moon landings, and the Earth is flat. And, as Twitter quickly found, Lewis is loud and proud in her belief system, having appeared on this Jubilee Media discussion on YouTube, arguing with scientists about whether Earth is flat.

“I live in Dana Point,” she says at one point in this video. “We see too far… I can see San Clemente Island, which is 60 miles away.” She also contends that as ships disappear she can still see them with a zoom lens.

Lewis was a speaker at the Flat Earth International Conference last year, and in her bio it states, “She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she entertained hopes of becoming an AstroNOT.” It further says she was discharged from the military after being diagnosed with lupus, and she now treats the condition with a vegan lifestyle and alternative medicine.

The problem with America is that we’ve allowed this kind of inanity to flourish unchecked, to the point where Entitle Dumbassery can run for president and win.

Give it up, Ray

Oh. Ray Comfort is still making his dishonest videos? Here’s the trailer for the latest, title “Amazing Athiest [sp]: A journey of two atheists”.

Do you know those two guys? Are they supposed to be representative atheists? You know Comfort’s schtick: he confronts random people in the street who probably haven’t thought much about the subject he’s asking about, and then puts up a gloating video claiming that “hurr, hurr, hurr — look at these people who aren’t professional debaters.” Or, as the blurb says, “See their inconsistencies and struggles as they attempt to justify their blind faith.” This looks to be more of the same.

I’ll skip it.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Property values in Alex Jones’ neighborhood must be plummeting

He is a scary, sick man. He fantasizes about chopping up his neighbors and feeding them to his daughters. Where is CPS?

Speaking of values plummeting, Elon Musk murdered the price of his stock with a tweet. One tweet about the price of his stock being too high, and investors promptly wiped out $14 billion of his company’s worth (and $3 billion off his personal worth). That ought to make you wonder: if tweeting 6 words demolishes all that money in a day, doesn’t that tell you that stock prices are mostly a shared fiction? If I had any personal investments in the stock market, I’d want to bail out fast and invest in something real…like, maybe, tulips.

We should also wonder about something else. All these famous “influencers” — Jones, Musk, Jordan Peterson, probably many others — are exposed as flawed, fragile people who seem to have been broken by fortune and fame to the point where any little thing seems able to tip them over into a slide towards self-destruction. It’s a long slide, too, where they continue to be newsworthy even as they expose themselves to be merely human and far too damaged to be authorities or leaders in much of anything.

Hoo boy, the Discovery Institute is pathetic

Everyone seems to be “pivoting to video”, including the creationists, so I might as well join in the fun. The Discovery Institute put out a quasi-animated video with a young hipster narrator to promote science denialism — they want to claim that the whale transitional series is bogus, and that all those fossils are just a random jumble of unconnected species that somehow just appeared, and none of them are really intermediates. So I had to expose the flaws in their thinking. Unstylishly, of course.

If I look a little bit squinky-eyed, it’s because I only noticed after recording it that the sun was glaring in through the window to one side. Next time I do one of these, I’d better draw the blinds.

Shocking: Muslim call to prayer broadcast on the streets of Minneapolis!

It’s true! The Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque will be playing the adhan five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. You may recall that that was the Minneapolis neighborhood visited by Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer in their quest to find the Muslim terrorists lurking there.

The Muslim call to prayer will be broadcast the traditional five times a day in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, beginning with the start of Ramadan this week and continuing through the end of the religious holiday in May.

I checked out a few sites where this news was being reported. There’s a lot of Jesus-freaking going on, but I thought this comment merited my attention.

We need to shut this down. Where are all the “principled atheists” and “skeptical scientists” to oppose this? They’ll sure put up a fuss if there’s a cross outside or a Ten Commandments display in a courthouse. Cricket noises when the city pays* for loudspeakers to blast Muslim propaganda into neighborhoods.

He put the asterisk there because there isn’t actually any sign that the city paid for it, he just thinks they did. But hey! “Principled atheist.” “Skeptical scientist.” He might as well have written by name in there, because that’s me, and I do have a response.

I titled this “shocking” because the story implies that Muslim communities were not allowed to make the call to prayer before this. That’s just wrong! The Christian believers are always ringing bells and singing Christian carols between October and January and inviting people to church without a single qualm. But Muslims haven’t been allowed to do the same for their religion? Why? If the Catholic church down the street from me can ring their bells multiple times a day on Sundays, why can’t the muezzins do likewise for their faith, within the limits of noise ordnances? If singing “God is Great” and “There is no God but God” is propaganda, then so is saying “Jesus is Lord”, and you can’t ban one without banning the other.

Freedom of religion means you can’t impose your religion on me, and I can’t force my godlessness on you, and that all religions and non-religions ought to be treated equally. I have no problem with this practice, any more than I complain about the nearby Catholic church. I’d go further and say we shouldn’t disallow it once Ramadan is over, within any limits on frequency and volume that must be equally applied to all churches as well. Also, to me, if ever the urge strikes me to go outside and bang pots and shake my fist at the sky and yell about religions being false.

It’s especially good to allow this practice if it makes Jacob Wohl pee his pants.

Welcome to real skepticism

Some anonymous guy wrote a popular blog post in which they proposed a radical new idea that the real mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 action was that the virus invaded red blood cells, displaced iron from the heme group in hemoglobin, and thereby both reduced the O2 carrying capacity of blood cells, and released large amounts of toxic iron. They had no expertise in medicine, molecular biology, or epidemiology, and their hypothesis was total bollocking nonsense. The post has since been taken down.

Now there is a thorough post up that utterly demolishes the original claim. I’m not a fan of the hyperbole of saying someone was “destroyed” by a blog post, but in this case, the word applies. The author is an MD/PhD with a specialization in the molecular biology of mammalian heme globins, and he tears into the claims at every level and burns them to the ground. It’s wonderfully entertaining, if you enjoy good science and despise quacks.

His conclusion also brings up a very good question: why do people promote pseudoscience?

The above discussion is by no means an exhaustive list of the blog post’s incorrect statements or conclusions. Nonetheless, I hope it has been sufficient to make clear that the blog post, and even the scientific article that likely inspired it, should not be viewed as a source of any meaningful insight into SARS-CoV-2, how it affects patients, or how the virus might be treated. What I still don’t know is why the blog post author, under a pseudonym, chose to present such an incorrect description of this disease and the underlying pathophysiology with such confidence. That they would go so far as to suggest treatments for the disease despite a lack of any medical training, and in virtually the same paragraph condemn “armchair pseudo-physicians” who push incorrect information, is truly mind-boggling. Tragically, whether it arises from genuine malice, unfounded arrogance, or just simple ignorance, this sort of misinformation about a deadly pandemic can genuinely put lives at risk, and it’s up to those of us who work in this field to fight back against it in whatever way we can.

I wish I understood this phenomenon myself. It comes up all the time in evolution debates — some clown makes grand, sweeping statements dismissing evolutionary biology, and when he gets quizzed on the subject, it becomes rapidly apparent that they know nothing about the subject, and their colon is packed with so much misinformation it’s backing up their throat and dribbling out their ears. Yet somehow the frauds get all the acclaim, get paid well, and bring in adoring mobs of followers who love to see the experts get dissed…oh wait. I think I might have just answered my own question. It’s all money and ego.

Note: there are also skeptics who are all about the money and ego. I’ve known a few.