I got some correspondence from a person at Portland State University, who tells me a bit about Peter Boghossian’s teaching. He teaches an introductory philosophy course on ethics, a subject with a deep history. Guess what his textbook is?
The one and only textbook?
The one that’s supposed to introduce students to philosophy and ethics?
It’s…
All the philanthropy in the world won’t erase his character — especially when all that money is coming from the accumulation of excess wealth. Bill Gates is getting scrutinized rather intensely, and it turns out he was the subject of internal investigation at Microsoft over his philandering. And there’s more! A while history of coming on to women in his employ!
And while it’s unclear whether the revelation about or investigation of the affair in question was a contributing factor to Gates’ recently-announced divorce from his wife of 27 years, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, it is an example of a longstanding pattern of questionable behavior by Gates. According to the New York Times report published on Sunday, Gates pursued multiple women who worked for him at Microsoft and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. As soon as she wrapped, he reportedly emailed her and asked her to dinner. “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,” Gates wrote in the email, which was shared with the Times. The employee said she did feel uncomfortable and ignored the request.
What could make this worse? Let’s throw in his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein!
Her concerns over Gates’ priorities were only compounded when the New York Times published the 2019 article “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” which detailed the men’s meetings together. While Epstein was connected with many wealthy and powerful people, “unlike many others, Mr. Gates started the relationship after Mr. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes,” the Times said. At the time, Bill told the publication, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But The Daily Beast reported on Sunday that “the billionaire met Epstein dozens of times starting in 2011 and continuing through to 2014 mostly at the financier’s Manhattan home” to discuss Gates’ “toxic” marriage.
A Gates representative denied the allegation: “Bill never received or solicited personal advice of any kind from Epstein— on marriage or anything else. Bill never complained about Melinda or his marriage to Epstein.”
His only salvation: give away all of his money and retreat into obscurity, where he’ll never again be able to meddle in affairs beyond his competence.
I guess there has been a wave of panic-buying of gasoline after a major pipeline was shut down; I haven’t noticed because I’ve been walking everywhere. People were concerned that they wouldn’t have fuel for their daily commute, so they were stockpiling gas in anything that would hold gas, including plastic bags. There are supposed to be safety laws that limit what you can use to store a flammable liquid, but apparently gas station owners were looking the other way. Sometimes, that led to disaster.
A Hummer in Florida burst into flames right after a driver filled four containers with gas.
Citrus County Fire Rescue said they responded to a call at a Texaco Food Mart in Homosassa, Fla. for a vehicle on fire on Wednesday.
Four 5-gallon containers filled with gasoline were in the back of the vehicle when it caught fire, officials said.
Hummers are practically a symbol of self-indulgent excess, so I would have applauded the sight. But what’s really ironic here is that a guy who was concerned about running out of gas is driving around in a Hummer, a vehicle that optimistically gets 10-14mpg. If we really want to save fuel, one way would be to torch every Hummer on the road. Go buy an electric or hybrid or at least a small economy car that gets 30-40 mpg.
We had a great fundraiser this week, and we’re going to talk about it and thank you all on Sunday.
I shackled myself to the computer today, and I can now report that every assignment, lab report, exam, and term paper for all three of my courses have been read and evaluated and scores entered into my Canvas class page.
I have a few more trivial things to do: I have to download everything into my laptop spreadsheet, because Canvas is too stupid to do normalization and important things like dropping the lowest exam score, as I told my genetics students I would do. I am, however, too brain-dead to do that right now, especially since the Evil Cat decided to deny me many hours of sleep last night. So I’ll do the finicky grade massaging tomorrow morning, and then submit all the grades to the registrar, and be done with this hellish academic year.
OK, so tonight I plan to veg out to something stupid on Netflix or whatever. I’ll have to see what’s available, and it better be really stupid, because I may pass out in the middle of it.
Of all the panspermists in the world, Rhawn Joseph is most deserving of rock that he fantasizes is a Nobel.
The goddamn cat decided to go on a goddamn mousehunt at 1am last night. She is no good at it. A mousehunt to her is an opportunity to torture a small helpless creature for a few hours. She finds a mouse, pounces on it, and then lets the terrified beast free to pounce on it again, and again, and again. Last night she played this game going around in circles about my bed, pouncing and jumping and thumping and growling and squeaking until I leapt up screaming, chasing the cat with a broom, trying to break this goddamn cycle and get her out of the room.
There were echoes of similarities with the movie, Mousehunt. I was the Nathan Lane character. If you’ve seen the movie, you know you never want to see yourself in any of the humans.
I could also see hints of myself in the Christopher Walken character, except last night I was doing a lot of futile yelling. Yeah, Nathan Lane.
I need to vent. I’m grading lab reports, and one of my banes is this: students who assemble a series of tables and plunk them into the results section with no text narrative. Nothing to glue them together. Just Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, I’m done. I tell them in Cell Biology that I hate this, that it’s completely unacceptable, and these students have gone through cell bio. I tell them again in Genetics; I tell them I want them to imagine that all of their tables and figures fell out of the manuscript, but I can get the gist of what the results are from the text. I tell them that a table or figure does not exist if it is not referenced in the text. They’ve done one lab report earlier in the semester, in which this rule was reiterated, and I gave them big fat zeroes on their results section if they committed this sin. Then have to know by now. I’ve emphasized it so many times this term. I tell them in lab. I tell them in lecture. I warn them that this is a huge peeve of mine, and students keep doing it despite my tirades, and this year, finally, I hope the whole class will get it.
First 6 student lab reports: they just have a string of tables for a results section.
Jesus fucking christ. This isn’t hard. Can I just give them all failing grades, quit my job, and apply to be a Walmart greeter? They’re doing worse than they did on the first lab report.
I am not encouraged to continue, but I must. If the next lab report fucks this up, I’m going to explode and my poor wife is going to come home to an office painted in blood and body parts.
I had to think back to the instructions I gave the students with the first lab report.
Introduction. You should explain what a complementation cross is, and you should explain what each of the mutants, scarlet and brown, do. I will not be expecting an extensive literature search; citing your textbook and flybase.org will be adequate.
Methods. Think back: you did a cross of st x st and bw x bw just to make lots of flies. You isolated virgin females to cross st x bw (and maybe did a reciprocal cross) and generate F1 flies. You then crossed the F1 flies to make an F2 generation. Explain all those steps! Imagine that your methods will be used by next year’s students to replicate this experiment.
Results. The core of the results section will be the data that is currently in a spreadsheet on Google. Reformat that into two pretty tables. You don’t have to include the entirety of the raw data; you might want to sum up particular categories. It’s all up to you how you present it. NOTE: Just the tables will not be an adequate results section. You must have a text narrative that explains the tables.
Discussion. Now interpret the results. Tell me what you expected, summarize what you observed, and do some statistics. Did what we saw fit the expectations? Remember that you looked at multiple phenomena. Are the sex ratios what you expected? Was one mutant more viable than the other? Are there anomalies in the data set, like maybe some groups got completely wacky results? Explain what must have happened. Another NOTE: there’s always a tendency to agonize over what went wrong. Try to emphasize the positive conclusions from the experiment.
I pretty much told them exactly what I expected. I also went over this in lecture and lab. I don’t know what went wrong, so I’m just going to blame COVID-19.
Lab reports are all graded now, and I didn’t die, yet. I’ve got to escape, though, so I’m going out for Mexican (I’m vaccinated! I can!): fish tacos and a margarita should help. Then I come back to do the next big assignment.
My final exams were due yesterday, and the students worked hard and got them all done and submitted online. I imported them all into Google Docs so I could mark them up electronically, and there they all are, lined up in nice tidy rows and columns on my drive, pristine and clean and organized. Lookin’ good! Pages and pages and pages of neatly typed essays and answers to problems! I give the computer an A+ for holding and organizing all that data. I admire the students for getting so much done.
Wait, what do mean, I’m not done?
I have to read all these things? And grade them?
Holy hell, that’s insane. Look at all of them! And I’m so damn tired.
OK, here’s the deal. I’m going to flee the house on a morning walk, but I’ll come back and then buckle down to methodically plowing through all this stuff, with the goal of maybe getting it all done by Friday, because I have things to do. I’m not going to enjoy myself, though. But I know I’ve got 58 students waiting anxiously on my final judgment, so I guess I’m going to have to do it.
But then, this weekend, I intend to be completely free.
