Brings back old memories

There was a shooting in Seattle yesterday, at 3rd & Pine, and I said to myself, “I know that place — that’s where I was shot at!” This was around 1978, and I was often catching a late night bus at 3rd & Pike. This one evening, there was an altercation on Pine; a sex worker (I was there so often I recognized many of the ladies working those corners) was screaming angrily at someone in a car, and I could hear it a block away. Then she pulled out a handgun and started firing away.

She didn’t hit the guy, she didn’t even hit the car. The bullets were coming my way — I’d see a flash and hear a little “tch” sound as they struck the sidewalk near me, followed by a faint “pop” from the gun. I scrambled to hide behind a lamp post, thinking this would be a really stupid way to die, as an unintentional target of an angry woman who couldn’t hit a car ten feet away from her. Honestly, though, it was some small caliber pistol, shots were all over the place — one did make a little “pok” sound when it punched through a store window — even if one hit me by chance, it was unlikely to be lethal. I don’t think her target was hit at all, and he just drove away.

So just like the shooting yesterday, in the same place at least. Except this time the shooter was a bit more heavily armed and went on a far more determined shooting spree: one dead, seven injured, including a 9 year old boy.

We can’t change human nature easily — there will always be angry incidents and violent responses, just as there were in 1978 and 2020. What we could control, if we had the will, was the availability of lethal technology. The shooting yesterday was a product of human nature amplified by deadly weapons that had no place on a civilized city street.

Never cross the streams

I have been sent an attempt to unify my two obsessions: an octopus is just a wet spider.

No. No. NO. I was surprised at how strongly my brain rejected this proposition — my first reaction was to want to scream at the screen, that this is not correct, don’t you know anything about arachnids and cephalopods, my god, you fool, I need to set everything on fire, this is going to simmer in my brain like acid, aaaargh, do I have to write a whole book on this ridiculous idea, how dare you, now I’m going to have counter-arguments reverberating through my skull for at least a week!

It was objectively interesting how being close to something can trigger such a strong reaction to counter-factual nonsense. Sure, you can tell me that baseball is just football with sticks, and I’ll chuckle and move on and forget about it in minutes, but an inappropriate comparison of my two totally independent, incomparable, glorious organisms feels like you just stuck a hand-grenade in my eye socket. I am totally discombobulated.

I’m better now, though. I’ve calmed down. Just don’t say that phrase to me ever again, I might cry.

You have to spend money to make money, am I right?

This letter is purportedly from Human Resources to an employee with an older, unsightly car. I don’t know if it’s genuine or not, but the attitude is certainly authentic — it’s just that usually they avoid making it quite so blatant.

We tend to drive our cars into the ground. My wife and I get the least expensive vehicle that has a good reliability rating, and then we drive it forever, or until it breaks down. We are not the types to buy a new car every year for the status (we can’t afford a new car every year, anyway), and I can’t imagine myself ever washing and polishing a utilitarian device like that, anyway.

Fortunately, we college professors can get away with a little slovenliness, but my wife did have at least one incident where she spotted her employer circling around her dinged-up car, scowling. You know there are lots of Americans who will judge you on the presumed prestige of your car, and that spending money on the right upscale things is an important aspect of performative capitalism.

It’s only surprising that, if this letter is genuine, anyone would make the superficiality of the attitude explicit.

Anyone remember Pepsigate on ScienceBlogs?

Since we discontinued the ads on this site, I (and other bloggers) get lots of promotional crapola from people who want to put them back on — I will not. I thought this invitation from sourceglobalmedia.com was, well, unethical.

Please let us know pricing and options to place content relevant on your website but would have 1 link to Gaming Industry website. Further details:

● We will reimburse yourselves for a one off administration fee in uploading and maintaining the content on your website as long as the site is still live.

● Within the body of the content Please do not suggest the article is paid / sponsored / advertorial in the content

● We will provide you with the article that will include citations and images, as to make the content with editorial value, we request that all these are kept in.

Please come back to me and we can provide both content and payment.

It’s that second clause in particular. They’ll provide content, but we are required to pretend it is our own original work, and not mention that it was paid advertising. We won’t do that. That’s sleazy.

If you suddenly see posts written in an entirely different style, babbling about my amazing scores in fast twitch video games, you’ll know I sold out. The legal debts must be getting to me.

100% ready and champing at the bit

I am organized! Now ready to face the spring semester, although I’ve also learned that I’m apparently up to be the biology discipline coordinator*, so I may not be as ready as I think. I got a lot done today, at least, and will be able to walk brightly into my new classes, not looking at all like a pole-axed cow.

Tonight I’m going to take a deep breath and relax by going to the movie. Little Women is playing, which I hear is very good, and also Dr Doolittle, which is getting panned. I think I’ll go to the one that I might have a chance of enjoying.

*There are no perks at all associated with being the discipline coordinator, not even a fancy hat. Maybe my first agenda item as I rise to power is to propose the creation of a fancy hat, to make it all worthwhile.

I have to go back to work today!

I know it’s a holiday, but it’s also the day before classes resume, so I have to go in and make sure everything is ready and perfect. It’s also my last day to work in the lab before an unusually hellish week — we’ve got job candidates coming into town to interview for our ecology position, and I’m on the committee doing phone interviews for our biochemistry position. It’s going to be a killer couple of days, but the good news is that this first week should be the worst week.

Space Force must be suitably armored

You may have heard that the Space Force has announced what their uniforms will look like — boring bog-standard army camo. Many people are mocking this decision, and rightly so. There is only one acceptable choice for the Space Force uniform, and this is it:

Obviously, that’s an officer’s uniform…I imagine there will be variants for various ranks, and something less intimidating for the privates. Some kind of simple armor, perhaps? A helmet with a slit for the eyes? I’ll leave the design for the lesser ranks to others.

Uh-oh. Drexel is going to get a shake-up

This is not supposed to be possible. How do you redirect grant funds to strip clubs?

The former chair of the Drexel University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering spent more than $96,000 on area strip clubs and sports bars, in addition to $89,000 on food and iTunes purchases, the district attorney’s office said in a statement.

A university audit showed the longtime professor, who spent nearly three decades at the school, made numerous, unapproved purchases between 2010 and 2017 that he tried to be reimbursed for through research grants, according to state prosecutors.

My grants have all had long, detailed breakdowns of the proposed budget; the awards are then salted away by the university under multiple accounts with designated purposes, like “salaries”, “equipment”, “supplies”; there is a university administrator who monitors everything. I don’t have a checkbook that accesses the accounts. When I want to use my money to buy something, I go through university purchasing, which can draw on the funds, and they buy it for me. Last year I got a new incubator, which was justified under my proposal, and then I realized I needed a second one, which was not, and had to write an explanation to the administrator explaining why I wanted to move funds from one category to another to purchase this equipment. When we had the HHMI grant, we were frequently juggling the budget — this category came in under budget, this one looks like it was going to be a bit over — and we’d have to contact the Howard Hughes institution to clear it.

So this guy had an engineering grant, and he was able to blithely shuffle money from it into entertainment expenses? Unspecified entertainment expenses, since he wasn’t going to be able to invoice a local strip club, and just redirected reimbursements straight into his pocket to the tune of $185,000?

Unreal. I predict that a horde of accountants are going to crack the whip over every department at Drexel, because this is the kind of sloppy management that gets grants yanked.

Oh, yeah, and that department chair has already been fired, and is probably going to jail.

The madness is setting in

I keep looking outside and thinking, “It’s not too bad yet, I can probably make it to the lab and back”, so I may just make one quick trip outside of my shelter. Before I’m snowed in. To check on the spiders. It’s only about 150 meters. I could make it.

If you don’t hear from me again later this morning, send a search party.