I’ve been in lab all afternoon, this section finished up ten minutes early. So in case you’ve wondered, this is how I face my students nowadays.

It’s kind of offputting, but then, the students are all wearing masks, too.

Please, can we end the pandemic soon? I don’t much care for trying to teach while looking like a mysterious spaceman.

Can he just go away now? He’s in the news again because the Sunday Times has published an interview with him…which I haven’t read since it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the teaser:

Ithought this was going to be a normal interview with Jordan Peterson. After speaking with him at length, and with his daughter for even longer, I no longer have any idea what it is. I don’t know if this is a story about drug dependency, or doctors, or Peterson family dynamics — or a parable about toxic masculinity. Whatever else it is, it’s very strange.

It sounds like it’s an accurate description of how weird the Peterson family is, but obviously, Peterson disagrees and thinks the published interview grossly distorts the truth. I don’t know, not having read it; maybe it’s horribly biased, maybe it mangles the whole story, I just don’t care, but I can appreciate that Peterson would want to correct the record, if so. So Peterson chose to release the complete transcript of the interview.

If he thinks that makes him look normal, oh man, the Times article must be a rip-roaring phantasmagoria of bizarreness, because yikes, the transcript is freaky. His daughter, Mikhaila, is very much an enabler of his delusions. For instance, he really goes on and on about his diet obsessions.

Jordan 16:15
When I talked to Sam Harris- it’s very complicated, and I’m still trying to piece all of this together, but I had gone to see my family, my extended family on my wife’s side, and Mikhaila and her husband, and me, both- all of us came down with the same symptom set that lasted about three weeks, and it was absolutely terrible. I couldn’t get up without fainting. I’d faint, fall to the floor, gray out, not blackout completely, but gray out every time I got up. I couldn’t get warm. I was wearing multiple layers of clothes and multiple layers of blankets, and I couldn’t get warm. I had an overwhelming sense of doom and anxiety, and I didn’t want to move, and plus I couldn’t sleep for days and days. I don’t- I was without sleep for many weeks. And you know-

Interviewer 17:17
And this was from inadvertently ingesting apple cider?

Jordan 17:22
Look, that’s- that’s-

Mikhaila 17:24
It wasn’t. No. Hold on.

Jordan 17:26
There were, no doubt, multiple-

Mikhaila 17:28
Hold up. It wasn’t apple cider. It was sodium metabisulfite in apple cider. Like the alcoholic apple cider was added to a stew.

Interviewer 17:40
Understood.

Mikhaila 17:40
So it was sodium metabisulfite in that apple cider, but it wasn’t apple cider.

He was sick. He had problems. I can’t deny that. But the idea that one sip of sodium metabisulfite sent his life spiraling into catastrophe is unlikely.

Apparently he was a total wreck, but he was swiftly cured by his all-meat diet. This guy sounds exactly like one of those gullible tools promoting snake oil.

Jordan 22:09
Yes. And the diet did a lot of different things, had a lot of different effects on me. One of the most market effects immediately was that I stopped snoring, and that happened within a week. It was very, very surprising to me. And then I had psoriasis and that cleared up, and I had gum disease, and that cleared up which is- that’s not curable, gum disease, so it’s treatable, but not curable, but it’s completely cleared up. And I lost 70 pounds over about a seven month period. So the transformation was remarkable. And I’ve had other autoimmune symptoms in my life. I had alopecia areata at one point and thought I was going to lose all my hair, but luckily that stopped. And I had this condition called peripheral uveitis, which is an inflammation in the tissue of the eye, and markers on my fingernails for autoimmune- like an autoimmune condition, your body attacks its own cells, and I had markers for that as well. And I have had a lengthy history of mouth ulcers…

I suspect the Times committed the unforgivable crime of editing his words and trying to make the Peterson family interesting, because oh my god, it was the most boring thing ever. It’s an old man whining about his multitude of illnesses, with his quack of a daughter chiming in now and then with comments about how she, lacking all medical training, had diagnosed him and cured him with her magic diet. It’s stultifyingly stupid and uninteresting and morbidly bizarre. He does talk at one point about how the political left and right are exactly the same, and that what’s ripping the US apart is the feedback that keeps them swinging madly back and forth…I just wanted to yell “PROJECTION!” at the screen, because there is clearly some kind of pathological hypochondriac dynamic going on in his family that is pushing him back and forth.

But mainly, it’s agonizingly boring. I imagine the reporter struggled to extract anything at all interesting from it. Apparently, the Times reported that he’s a schizophrenic weirdo, to which Mikhaila just says nah, he was akathisic (akathisia is mentioned 91 times in the interview!) — but no one is going to confuse akathesia with schozophrenia, except maybe that colossal ignoramus, Mikhaila. All I can think is…

Shut up, Jordan Peterson, you meandering mumbling old git.

This is sad — Wolpert was one of my favorite developmental biologists. Years ago I wrestled with my choice of developmental textbook, between Scott Gilbert’s Developmental Biology, which is very very good, and Wolpert’s Principles of Development, which I eventually decided was a better fit to how I taught the course. I also appreciated his work on positional information and patterning. And now he has died at the age of 91, and only now do I find out that he lived an interesting life.

He studied civil engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he became involved in progressive politics, helping to distribute communist literature in the townships; in 1952 he met Nelson Mandela. After two years working on soil mechanics as assistant to the director of the Building Research Institute in Pretoria, he hitchhiked to Europe, working briefly for the water planning board in Israel before studying soil mechanics at Imperial College London.

His life was changed when a friend in South Africa wrote to suggest he apply his knowledge of mechanics to the study of dividing cells. The biophysicist James Danielli at King’s College London accepted him as a PhD student, and with a Swedish colleague, Trygve Gustafson, he went on to measure the mechanical forces involved in cell division. He was promoted to lecturer and reader (in zoology) at King’s before taking up the chair of biology as applied to medicine at the Middlesex (transferred to University College London after the two institutions merged), where he remained until he retired aged 74.

He was also a great popularizer with a radio show discussing science in the UK, which I’ve had difficulty finding here — he does have a debate with William Lane Craig on YouTube, which I’ve avoided ever watching, because I can’t stand that sanctimonious Christian liar. Wolpert also has some things I disagree with, such as his gender essentialist leanings, a common problem with older developmental biologists steeped in model systems and lacking exposure to population thinking.

It wasn’t all an upward ascent for him. He suffered from a crippling depression.

The marriage to Elizabeth ended in divorce, and in 1993 Wolpert married the Australian writer Jill Neville. It was when his working and home lives were at their most secure and harmonious that a suicidal episode led to him spending three weeks in hospital. He recovered after treatment with antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. Jill died suddenly of cancer in 1997.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate how devastating depression can be. And cancer sucks.

Because I find this rather convincing that COVID-19 is much more than “just a flu”.

The Minnesota numbers are in, and they don’t look good.

Minnesota suffered more than 50,000 deaths in a year for the first time in recorded state history in 2020, mostly because of COVID-19 but also due to rising drug abuse and worsening racial health disparities.

A 15% increase in mortality from 2019 to 2020 demonstrates that the pandemic actually caused more deaths in Minnesota and wasn’t just a substitute cause for people who were likely to die anyway.

Hey, can we simplify that and just call all the deaths due to the neglected pandemic response, the erosion of our social safety net, and racism the Republican death toll?

How about a happier story? About finding treasure?

A fellow in upstate NY bought an old building and was renovating it, when he discovered an attic that had been closed and sealed over with drywall for about a century. He peeled away the old drywall, climbed up, and found…

With his friend Ian Boni, owner of Twisted Rail Brewing Company who also owns property in Geneva, the men stacked several chairs upward. Standing atop the teetering tower with a flashlight in hand, Whitcomb spotted several dust-and-soot covered gold-framed photographs.

He turned to Boni and said, “I think we just found the Goonies treasure.”

The two men came across what appeared to be a storage site of a vintage photography studio. The vaulted attic was filled with vintage photographs, framed pictures and photography equipment and boxes of materials.

They had uncovered contents of a turn-of-the-century photography studio, complete with props, chairs and backdrops. Boni said he didn’t recognize suffragist Susan B. Anthony or any of the other people featured in the dozens of photos he helped remove from the attic.

It had been owned by James Ellery Hale, a photographer from the turn of the previous century who was well known for his photos of the suffragette movement, so there are all these dusty photos and photographic plates of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other, not yet identified figures of the early movement. This is amazing.

I checked out my house’s attic (it was built in the 1940s), but I’m afraid all I found was mouse poop and fiberglass insulation, darn it. But we do have a lot of old buildings in Morris, and now I’m wondering what treasures we could find if we had access.

They’re full of spiders, I bet!

We were out playing in the snow with Iliana. I asked her if it was OK if we took some selfies.

“Yeth,” she said.

So we did.

On the way home, we passed a person who said, “Oh, what a cutie pie!”

I wasn’t sure which of us the person was talking about, so a little further on, I asked Iliana, “Are you really a cutie pie?”

“Yeth,” she said.

We’re going to be doing a bit of traveling today, so I thought I’d start us off with a traditional hearty breakfast. Bacon and eggs, that’s the ticket! We’re ovo-lacto pescatarians, vegetarian easy mode, so the eggs are fine, but bacon is forbidden. Fortunately, we had picked up some Morning Star Farms Veggie Bacon Strips, so I thought I’d try those.

Big mistake.

These are perfectly rectangular, thin, flat sheets of something marbled with pink and white. A serving is 4.5 grams of fat, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of carbohydrate. You cook them in a frying pan, as if it were real bacon, and they sit there and get crispier, flatly. There’s none of the shrinking you get with real bacon, so after they’re heated through, you’ve still got an array of pink and white flawless rectangles.

Then you bite into one. They’re flavorless! They have a uniform texture which is nothing like bacon, lacking any fat. It’s exactly like thin strips of cardboard.

It’s my own damn fault for buying something that pretends to be meat-like. There’s nothing wrong with vegetarian food, and in fact it’s really tasty and flavorful and textured and complex, except when someone tries to make a pale imitation of something that relies on the complexity of animal tissue, and fails.

Even these Beyond/Impossible burgers have set themselves a low bar of emulating a meat that has a lot of the complexity ground out of it, and they’re not bad, but you can still tell the difference, and who knows how much effort has been put into the chemistry to get an approximation to ground meat flavor.

I should have just made a plateful of beans.