I can feel the end of the semester coming. It’s creeping this way, like the small spiders emerging in my garage, anticipating a fabulous summer and fall of freedom.

It’s not quite here yet, though. This week it’s all about giving advice on final lab reports that are due on Friday — my entire afternoon is going to be spent reading drafts and checking the math on genetics papers, so that their final submission will be perfect and will possibly save their grades (I write evil exams, I’m sorry to say, and the students look slightly traumatized and shocked right now.)

And then I find some writing advice on the internet, which might be just barely in time!

I anticipate that most of what I’ll be reading today will be in the passive voice. I might just recommend trying passive-aggressive voice, or conspiracy voice, or if they’re really daring, active voice.

I intensely dislike accusations of ad hominem from people who don’t understand what ad hominem is.

Hello professor, I read your blogs from time to time getting different perspectives on important issues. The recent article about Krauss, there is allot of ad hominem, is that a good strategy to sway people towards a viewpoint, instead of arguing the specific points ?

He is referring to this post. It would be ad hominem to say “Krauss is a harasser, because he was a physic professor.” It is not ad hominem to compile a collection of observations and assessments by his peers that directly corroborate the accusation.

The idea that presenting evidence is an ad hominem fallacy is a defense used by people who want to suppress the evidence.

I should just get off the internet altogether, maybe. Get a tarpaper shack with no electricity or running water somewhere.

For those who don’t know, the NY Times Pitchbot posts humorous, sarcastic versions of the kind of centrist bullshit the NY Times is notorious for publishing. Sometimes it hits a bit close to the bone.

There’s a week and a half until the end of the semester…will I make it? I’m giving myself a 50% chance of crawling across the finish line and then curling up into a soggy ball of tears, vs. a 50% chance of exploding before the end of the term and then raining down as smoldering cinders.

I could see this coming way back in August — it’s been a long decade — so I cleverly scheduled student presentations for the last bit of the term. I don’t have to do any class prep right now, even though I’ve got a lot of material lined up just because…because I can’t help myself, and am always tweaking things and making additions just in case I need it. For the same reason, I can’t leave well enough alone and every year I rewrite and change my classes despite having taught this stuff for about 30 years. Nothing is going to help. No matter what, I’m going to be clawing my eyes out and suppressing screams as every term comes to a close.

I really ought to retire, but I can’t, not ever. I guess I get to look forward to death.

The weird thing is that I like teaching. This would be a lot easier if I didn’t care.

Never mind me, I just have to scream into the uncaring void every once in a while.

This past weekend, I had a brief encounter with a ranting, raving kook howling about nefarious Jews and the virtues of the Tao. He also predicted that the Pope would die in 48 hours.

Uh-oh. The Pope has died.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died, the Vatican said on Monday, ending an often turbulent reign marked by division and tension as he sought to overhaul the hidebound institution.
He was 88, and had suffered a serious bout of double pneumonia this year, but his death came as a shock after he had been driven around St. Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile to greet cheering crowds on Easter Sunday.

He was 88, had been very ill, so it’s not much of a prediction, but OK, he gets to score 1 point. I’m going to predict that the street kook is feeling full of himself today and is babbling more nonsense more vehemently, a prediction that is even more predictable.

Last night, this beast nearly cost me a lot of money.

She decided to jump up on my desk, but she is not a sinuous, agile feline — she is an inept, clumsy idiot. She landed on my webcam and sent it flying, and then tried to recover badly by leaping up and back, ending up between the wall and my computer, where there’s nothing but a tangle of cables which did not provide a solid purchase. She scrabbled frantically at the cables, disconnecting most of them, and hurled herself at the wall, then bounced into the back of the monitor.

I don’t know what she did next because all I saw was that my computer shut down and the monitor was toppling forward into my face.

Anyway, if anyone needs a demolition cat I’m willing to throw her into a box and pay for the postage.

My calendar is set up to pop up a message every 16 April: “Call your mother.” I think I’ll keep that alert despite the fact that I can’t call her anymore.

She’d be 86 years old today.

Jeff Bezos launched Katy Perry into space for 11 minutes.

That’s it. That’s our big news today. Woo hoo.

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You can find a most excellent summary of the whole thing in the Guardian.

Given the mixture of freebie rides and seats sold to the super-rich, the thing people always say about Blue Origin tickets is that prices range from zero to $28m dollars. A bit like a seat on a RyanAir flight to Tallinn. But these spots were all personally gifted by Bezos and Sánchez because this was an Important Mission. Which also meant the whole thing was exclusively documented by Blue Origin’s Pravda-like web channel. Here, the anchors and reporters kept explaining that – unlike when men went to space in the past – this mission was all about emotions. But look, it’s great that we’re valorising emotions above all things, because it gives me permission to say how very much I hated this entire, hilariously vacuous spectacle.

I get all kinds of awful advice from the internet. Just now, on my work email account, I got a message from the Star Tribune telling me how to Make your smartphone dumb, and other tips to break social media addiction. Maybe the first thing I need to do is tell the Star Tribune to stop sending me this crap.

You could switch to a flip phone. You could quit social media. But there are also ways to make your smartphone dumber, with apps and hacks and old-fashioned mindfulness.

First, you have to understand why social media is sucking you in. Studies show that engaging with social media can produce oxytocin and trigger tiny releases of dopamine, said Kit Breshears, an instructor with the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. Apps feature a pulldown refresh mechanism that functions a lot like a slot machine.

No, I can’t do that. My phone has gradually become an essential tool for working with teaching and administrative materials — I can’t shut it off, since I have to deal with push notifications in order to log in to official university web pages, and because my students contact me through the phone (yes, I gave out my personal phone number to my students) to tell me if they need help at the genetics lab, any time of day. I can’t make my smartphone dumber, without compromising my work!

I’m also prejudiced that this advice is coming from the Center for Spirituality and Healing. Here’s an idea: shut down that palace of quackery.

But also, I have a problem with placing the blame for the problem on the user, and making it our responsibility to police the corporations that are sending out the addictive poison. I would love to be able to get a little dose of oxytocin and dopamine at will. What’s wrong with that? Taking a break and looking at cat photos (or in my case, spider photos) might be beneficial to our emotional well-being. The problem isn’t that we can self-administer mild pleasure with a click of a button, it’s that that mechanism has been hijacked by capitalism. You want a little relaxation, and it’s always accompanied by companies using it to sell you something, or make you feel bad for what you are doing, so that you have to buy the cure they are selling. This one article mentions a $59 device to block signals in your home, and an app you can download to reduce your phone to a “minimalist phone”. Fine. But the problem isn’t that I have a device that can access the internet at any time, it’s that the internet has been shittified to such a remarkable degree that it’s painful to use it.

You know, I was just noticing something recently: my habit is to charge up my phone when I get home from work, and then put it by my bedside overnight, in case there’s an emergency. I’ve felt like I’ve got infinite battery, because it almost never drops below 90% charge, unless I’m away on a long trip. Apparently, I’m not addicted to endless doom-scrolling. It’s possible to be a hopeless nerd who loves his fancy gadgets and not be the kind of fool who follows the advice of a quack from CSH.

Mainly, though, stop blaming your phone for your own problems with technology and capitalism.