Last 3 weeks!

The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.

  • This week: cell signaling.
  • Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
  • Final week: cell origins.

It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.

Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.

Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.

I thought enrollments were supposed to be down?

Yikes. It’s the first day of spring term registration, first thing in the morning, and my genetics class is already full…plus I’m giving a few students permission to take it beyond capacity (I’m splitting all the labs to meet pandemic requirements).

Spring: all the anxiety and overwork of the fall, only with crappier weather. They better cure this pandemic soon, or I may keel over from the stress.

Oh, wait. Pandemics don’t happen anymore.

Well, if a Harvard Professor says so, it must be true.

It’s a wrap!

Our October fundraiser is over, and it was a success: we had fun, we hope we made readers aware of a few more of the many blogs here at the network, and we also raised about $2K, which will shortly be sent off to the people managing our legal debt. Everything was recorded using the magic of the interwebs, so if you missed it, you can still review everything online. Thank you all!

Now we’ll stop pestering you for donations. For a little while.

Our brains are spinning about a bit thinking of fun things to do for a Winter Festival* fundraiser, sometime after American Thanksgiving and perhaps in early December. This would be the perfect time for our readers to make suggestions about what you’d like to see and/or hear us do, and perhaps you have a favorite blog here that you’d like to see represented in the event. Speak up now, especially you donors!

*We have an election tomorrow, so who knows? Maybe we’ll have to do lessons on building barricades, or how to field strip an AK-47, or recipes for squirrel. We’ll be flexible.

A Dark Web: Part Six

This is the conclusion of our story chain, A Dark Web. You can find the previous chapters here:

  1. FTB Presents: A Dark Intellectual Web (Episode 1)
  2. A Dark Web: Part Two
  3. A Dark Web: Part Three
  4. A Dark Web: Part Four
  5. A Dark Web: Part Five

Warning: this chapter is a bit heavy on the exposition, and includes a little bit of gore and violence. Maybe a bit of body horror, too, if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of spider/human chimeras.

A Dark Web: Part Six
[Read more…]

Happy Halloween! Check out our schedule!

Yay! It’s an excuse to party — quietly, alone in our homes, spurning human contact — so I hope you’re all taking advantage of it. Here at Freethoughtblogs we’ve been assembling a few party favors over the past week, all listed on our fundraising page. A few highlights:

Don’t send us candy treats, though. Send money. Or join my Patreon. Please don’t TP our web server.

First they come for Milo, now they’ve come for Amos

The alt-right just loves those yahoo edgelords who push the boundaries well beyond civilized behavior, but there are limits. Milo Yiannopoulos flamed out when started babbling about how pedophilia wasn’t really that bad; then there’s this one strange fellow who was briefly embraced by right-wingers, Amos Yee (Mythicist Milwaukee tried to bring him to their ugly conference, before they woke up to his brand of flaming). Yee was openly advocating for sex with small children, even talking about sexual acts with infants; he was quite clear that he thought children would be capable of consent even when an adult is pressuring them or lying to them about sex. People like Sargon of Akkad and Count Dankula — you know, just those names ought to clue you in that these are ridiculous clowns — were supporting him. He was just trolling, you know, which makes it OK.

But now Yee has been arrested. I guess he pushed beyond just trolling.

A blogger from Singapore who was granted asylum to stay in the U.S. faces child pornography charges, according to prosecutors.

Amos Yee appeared Friday in court in Chicago on solicitation and possession of child pornography, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was being held on $1 million bail.

If the 20-year-old is convicted, he could lose his asylum status. He was taken into custody Thursday at his Chicago home.

In 2016, Yee was detained at O’Hare International Airport after fleeing Singapore. His online posts mocking and criticizing the Singapore government twice landed him in jail. He was granted asylum i n September 2017.

Prosecutors alleged he exchanged messages with a 14-year-old Texas girl last year that included nude photos. He also allegedly used his now-defunct YouTube channel to advocate for pedophilia, according to prosecutors.

Goodbye, Yee. Please drag down some more of those other wingnut trolls with you.