Today, I…

• Spent half a class hour working step by step through a cunningly clever linkage problem that most of my students didn’t get…

• Spent the rest of the hour trying to explain imprinting, slowly and carefully, with diagrams, and left everyone looking like they’d been pole-axed…

• Tried to race through Beadle-Tatum, Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick, and Meselson-Stahl (at an introductory level) in the next class.

My head hurts. Need a nap. A civilized country would put naptime in our schedules.

Oh, yeah, Stephen Hsu responded to me, too, and man, ignorance makes my brain hurt even more. I’ll reply to that later.

I’d say “after my nap,” but I have committee meetings to attend instead.

Shocking. It turns out that Milo Yiannopoulos is ghost-written. Everywhere. He’s got interns writing his articles, his talks…I wonder if he’s so lazy that he’s got them writing his tweets.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has about 44 interns — a mix of paid and unpaid — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

Two people write Breitbart stuff for me, he told BuzzFeed News, but ghostwriting is too great a word. [Nope. Ghostwriting is exactly the word. –pzm] He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. I have two books coming out this year, he said. It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.

A career like his…what career? He is, supposedly, a writer. What he does for a career is write stuff. He doesn’t have any other job. His wikipedia page identifies him as a journalist. He’s employed at Breitbart as their tech journalist — he doesn’t know much about “tech”, but I guess he’s as qualified to be labeled that as “journalist”.

You know, if he were calling himself an astronaut, and it turned out that the only people to step into a rocket were his paid staff and volunteers, It would be fair to call him out on that phoniness. If he said he was a movie star, but had a team of proxies who were doing all his acting for him, I’d wonder why anyone needed him at all. He’s got about as much of a career as a Kardashian, apparently, famous for being famous rather than talented, and mainly his job is posting selfies and preening.

And 44 interns? That’s ludicrous. What is there left for him to do after 44 people have written his text, edited his words, done all the labor of writing?

Worst of all, he’s outsourcing his writing to…goons from 4chan. That explains a lot, actually.

I’m going to be on a local college radio show, The Genesis of Genius (it also has a website) tonight at 8pm. We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t got a good read on what it’s all about yet, but hey, it’s a UMM student, so I probably won’t be too snarly.

I’m just watching the whole brand morph into something contemptible — they held out the longest, but it seems to be a general rule that mass media that promotes science will eventually sell out to peddle popular pablum. That’s happening right now before our eyes. Two things leap out at me:

• The rush to produce religious apologetics. They’re coming out with a new “documentary”, The Story of God, that from this excerpt is clearly total crap with a good budget (they hired Morgan Freeman) and some quality production values.

  That’s terrible. Videos of people gazing wisely into space are not evidence for a deity. Subjective anecdotes from a guy who nearly died recalling the hallucinations his oxygen-starved brain generated are not convincing evidence of an afterlife.

  There is potential for a fascinating analysis of comparative religion, but this does not seem to be that story. That story would be the story of humans grappling with their mortality, not the story of an imaginary being called “god”.

• The lack of appreciation of good, solid content. I’ve just learned that NatGeo is going to discontinue Brian Switek’s Laelaps blog. That’s shocking, too: Switek puts out quality science regularly, every week or two, and he has an excellent reputation. The reason given for kicking him out is that he didn’t generate enough traffic to the site.

  That’s appalling. That sends a message: NatGeo doesn’t care about the quality of your content, just how many eyeballs swivel in your direction. If that’s your metric, then you’re doomed to drive right down into the pit of popular garbage.

  Maybe they can replace him with a Kardashian.

Watching something that was good and valuable slowly rot away is depressing.

Aaaaaaaargh.

I have to go back to work, and oh boy, is there a pile of new stuff I have to deal with. My students are coming back to thousands and thousands of flies that need to be scored, so they’re probably going to be grumpy, too.

Now it’s time for me to straggle in and buckle down and dig out from under labors deferred.

Sometimes, the hard part of being a humanist is all the goddamn humans.

At the cell and tissue level, they’re pretty nifty, but once they start perambulating around they’re mostly all about stomping on you.

I’d probably be happier if all my interactions with the world were with computers and embryos. OK, and libraries. Libraries are cool. Especially computer-accessible libraries with books about embryos.

I can cope when you’re reduced to electrons and photons.

“Hello, stream of bits,” I’d say with my own spray of bits.

“You’re looking lovely, ray of light!” I’d radiate.

I’d happily arrange pixels to say, “You can’t screw me over now, abstract pattern of simplified information!”

But people…people mostly suck.

Sorry, people.

If it helps, just remember that you’re looking at a stream of electrons rendered into an array of photons. It’s how I’m trying to see you, after all.