The students are free to suck on flies all hour long!

Which reminds me…I have to go open the fly lab right now.

How did that cartoonist steal it out of my head?

Speaking of spiders, I’ve mainly been reduced to just feeding them twice a week. I’ve got a 4-day weekend coming up on the 18th, maybe I can find time to do more with the adorable little critters then.

I shouldn’t have laughed at the Space Force naming themselves “Guardians”. It turns out they requested submissions and we had a boaty-mcboatface situation. Take a look at the list if you’re looking for a laugh.

They could have been “Galaxians”, or “Celestians”, or “Trekkies”, or “Geeks”, or “Loonies”, or “Homo spaciens”, or “Wookies”, or “Stormtroopers”.

You know what? They were all silly. No matter what they choose, they were going to look ridiculous.

She was an awesomely nice person.

Obituary
Loving wife, mother, sister, and friend Julie Lynn (Bjornsson) Myers passed away Friday, January 29, 2021 at her home in Hoquiam, WA, she was 59 years old. Julie was born August 31, 1961 to Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson in Ballard, WA
Growing up Julie lived most of her life in Ballard but also spent some time in Tacoma, WA. She graduated from high school then went on to continue her education at University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University earning her master’s degree. After earning her degree Julie held many jobs in the health care field as a project manager.
Later in life Julie met the love of her life James Myers and they later married, and both moved to Hoquiam in July 2015. Julie was an incredibly involved member of the Peace Corp in Samoa as well as the Pierce County Democrats and would faithfully attend services at the Ocean Shores Lutheran Church. She also has many hobbies such as traveling, hiking, sewing, and volunteering at the North Beach Paws.
Julie is survived by her husband James Myers of Hoquiam, WA; stepsons Charlie Myers of Bellingham, WA and Evan Myers of Rogers, AR; stepdaughter Rachael Hahn of McCleary, WA; brother Doug Bjornsson of Tacoma, WA; sister Margo Bjornsson of Ballard, WA; as well as her grandson Alexander Hahn. She is preceded in death by her parents Dwight and Shirley Bjornsson. All who knew Julie loved her and enjoyed her company.
Arrangements are entrusted to Harrison Family Mortuary of Aberdeen. To share memories or to sign the online guestbook please visit www.harrisonfamilymortuary.com.

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.