Mondays are for disillusionment

Me, right now

I am all caught up on my grading — until Friday, when it starts all over again — so I could have used some happy, wholesome news. Instead, I got this:

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender.

The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out, sometimes killing the baby long-tailed macaque monkeys in the process.

I mentioned this horrible monkey torture ring before. Does it count as good news that several people are going to prison over this activity, or is it bad news that such horrors exist at all? This is a better question than whether the stupid cup is half empty or half full — should we regard the existence of monkey torturers as an indictment of humanity, or the existence of anti-torture laws as an example of humanity’s virtues? I can go either way.

Unfortunately, then I read about 764, the torture ring that’s all about kids torturing kids. We should probably all just get off the internet.

Daniel Dennett has died

The last time I met Dennett was at a Darwin Day event where we were a double bill. We had a good time, he told me stories about his heart surgery, mentioned that all he really wanted to do was get away to his farm and make apple cider, we got to talking about evolution, and I told him I didn’t care much at all for his book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — it was naively adaptationist. He asked my opinion of free will, and I told him I never argue about it, because it was all an illusion and it didn’t matter whether minds had it or not. We got along famously, and corresponded for a while afterwards, until the fact that I was disenchanted with Dawkins, despised Harris, thought the whole idea of the “four horsemen” was disappointing jingo, and that sexism was poisoning everything, made me persona non grata among prominent atheists. Oh, well, we were friends for a while.

Now Dennett has died. That’s a sadness, because he was a good guy and brought a thoughtful, humanist perspective to atheism. I hope someone is taking care of his apples.

With Hitchens and Dennett dead, and Dawkins doddering on the edge of irrelevant crankiness, I guess that leaves young Mr Harris, the least of the quartet, holding the legacy of the Four Horsemen, and that propaganda concept can now fade away, unlamented. Dennett’s legacy will continue and his books are worth thinking about, even when I disagree with them.

Every time I think about our economic system, I shudder

I’d buy this car before I’d get a Tesla

I am increasingly feeling that the very rich have managed to pull a colossal scam on the whole world, where the grossly incompetent have rigged the system to make themselves wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Witness the collapse of Boeing, the entire goddamn Republican party, and of course, King Goober himself, Elon Musk. I appreciate this review of Tesla’s masterpiece, the Cybertruck.

As the Bay Area is both a nexus for world-class goobers and the region where Tesla used to be and kinda-sorta still is headquartered, I have seen a lot of Cybertrucks out in the wild over the past few months. They are remarkably fake- and shitty-looking in any context (Is that a big toaster with wi-fi next to me at the exit? Who’s driving the scrap metal assemblage with Bryan Colangelo-esque proportions? Why does every Cybertruck driver I glance at appear to be simultaneously peacocking for attention but also totally embarrassed, haunted by the unexamined knowledge that as a maneuver in a culture war they paid $100,000 for a car that doesn’t work?), though I saw one in the Santa Cruz mountains this past weekend. It looked even more jarringly synthetic and stupid in a truck-style environment, as if 10 seconds on a semi-paved road would undo the whole rickety car. I felt, amid standard-issue disgust and mockery, personal embarrassment to be paying through the nose to live in a place where the coolest thing you can do is cosplay as a 6-year-old’s idea of the coolest guy in the world.

Yep, a billionaire is successfully siphoning off $100,000 chunks of cash from upper-middle-class twits by selling them poorly made vehicles. At least most Trabants were still running a year after purchase, I don’t have the same confidence in the Cybertruck. And yet, after a succession of horrible decisions and running companies into the ground, Musk is still filthy rich.

I wonder why I’m losing any faith in capitalism?

Copenhagen

Last night, I attended a play, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. I was in the odd position of being invited to participate in a discussion at the end of the play, along with two other professors. I felt a bit superfluous — the play was very good, I didn’t have a lot to add.

You can watch the whole thing yourself with different players, since it was made into a movie. The movie is also very good, starring Stephen Rea and Daniel Craig, although it is marred by an introduction featuring Michio Kaku.

I saw it as an exploration of ambiguity and interpretation. Somehow our discussion afterwards veered into the virtues of negotiation and giving opponents an opportunity to explain their position, which I thought was a bit nuts. This was an example of the futility of trying to reason with fascists. It was about a meeting between Werner Heisenberg, proud German and head of the Nazi nuclear program (but not a Nazi) and Niels Bohr, half-Jewish Dane whose country had been taken over by the Nazis. This was in 1941, when there was no longer any doubt about the intent of Germany and the homicidal maniac running the country. In 1943, Bohr is going to have to flee his homeland to Sweden when the Nazis decide it’s time to clean up the Jewish ‘problem’ in Denmark.

(Horrible little story: Bohr was then evacuated to England in the bomb bay of a Mosquito fighter/bomber. Really? He was supposed to negotiate with the Nazis?)

Bohr and Heisenberg were two particles with complex and ambiguous relationships that they were struggling to resolve, but their countries, massive aggregates of particles, had a clear, sharp relationship that did not need further focus. The two individuals were old, close friends whose interpersonal relationship was a tangled mess that was well worth a conversation, but don’t extrapolate that to argue that we should be negotiating with Nazis.

That lost weekend

I think I’m recovered from my horrendous Shingrix vaccination — still a bit wobbly and fatigued, but progress has been made. The terrible thing is that we had a sunny, 25°C weekend, great for spiders, and I mostly missed it, and now we’re about to have a couple of days of heavy rain.

I will say that if you’re at risk of shingles you should get this potentially temporarily debilitating vaccine because shingles is so much worse.

The end is nigh!

I can see it. It’s coming. It will happen. The semester is almost over, winter is over, the spiders are stirring.

I’ve got 3 weeks to go, and they’re all mapped out. Next week the eco devo course will culminate in my last big effort, to summarize evo devo. Then the two weeks beyond that will be all about student presentations of specific topics. I get to just sit back and enjoy the communication of interesting science by a group of informed students, so it’s a bit of slack for me.

My two science writing courses are a bit less slacky — I’ve got 8 term papers dropping into my lap in the next few weeks. I warned them. I told them at the start that they’re probably worried about having to write ten pages, but I assured them that by the end of the term their concern will be about trimming the 20-30 page behemoth they’ve written down to a tight 15 pages. It’s all coming my way shortly. I’ve got three red pens waiting to be burned through.

Then summer arrives. I have big plans.

Next fall, I’m teaching a shiny new interdisciplinary course for non-majors titled “The History of Evolutionary Thought.” It’s also in the category of “writing-enriched,” which means about half the course hours are dedicated to student writing and training in writing. The genre we’re going to be pursuing is creative non-fiction — we’ll see if the students can handle that odd subset of essay writing. We’ll see if I can handle it too, so I’m going to have to be doing a lot of prep this summer.

Oh also…spiders. I’m going to stake out a couple of one meter square patches of my weedy yard and do weekly intensive species counts, and then similarly sample a few other locations and get a better feel for diversity. I’m going to be on my knees with a hand lens counting everything with 8 legs. I’m also going to be preparing a few sheltered locations, under rocks and logs, that I can survey with an endoscopic camera, get some background data, and then return to look them over in winter. I’m hoping we have a real winter next year, not the dry warm boring winter we had this year.

Before all that, though, grading. Lots of grading.

Also, on Monday, a performance with the Theatre discipline, sort of. I’m not acting, I’m discussing, on a stage. I’m not qualified to discuss the physics, but I think this is more about ethics.

Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen: A Play Reading and Discussion
Monday April 15th, 7:00pm in the George C. Fosgate Blackbox Theatre in the HFA

Join us for a reading of Act One of Copenhagen by Professor Ray Schultz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre, Lana Sugarman, and UMM Theatre alum Brennan Bassett followed by a moderated discussion with Dan Demetriou, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Peter Dolan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, and Paul Myers, Associate Professor of Biology. This collaboration was inspired by Laura Chajet, Assistant Professor of Physics.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a Tony-award winning play that examines a meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941 Copenhagen.Though they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a world war.

It’s free and open to the public if any of you are hanging out in Western Minnesota.

So that’s what AI is good for

There is this obsessed congresscreature from Missouri, Ann Wagner, who really really hates porn (she’s a Republican, as if you couldn’t guess.) She’s been crusading against sex workers for years, and her latest idea is that she wants to shut down OnlyFans, because, she claims, it enables sex trafficking. She’s full of it.

However, the one good thing she has done is that she motivated an OnlyFans performer, Cherie DeVille, to write a defense of OnlyFans’ techniques to prevent abuse of the site. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to get a site there, and they are extremely strict about preventing minors from getting access, and to prevent its use for prostitution. I was impressed at the level of scrutiny they apply to their performers to make sure there is no non-consensual imagery.

Anti-porn zealots act as if OnlyFans tries to post non-consensual sexual content. But sex workers’ experiences tell a different story. One of my friends had surgery on her labia, and when she returned from the doctor and resumed posting, OnlyFans flagged her content. OnlyFans uses AI to monitor people, and its AI identified her labia as a different woman’s vulva. The site prevented her from airing the content without uploading an ID for this supposed new individual. I struggle to imagine a non-consensual porn epidemic on OnlyFans when it’s this strict about identifying individual vulvas.

That seems redundant and excessive to me. You know they’ve got lots of human eyeballs staring at bits of human anatomy, wouldn’t having users flag surprises in their videos be sufficient, without using computers to stare, too? They’re burning bandwidth that someone has to pay for! Also, I worry about what we’re training AI to become.

Go away, Kooi Chong

We get email. We all get email. Since the dawn of time, a lot of us here at Freethoughtblogs (and also many other people) have been getting demanding messages from Kooi Chong. Here, he introduces himself.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Kooi Eng Chong, age 28 and I am from Malaysia. In the year 2020, I had finished my Master’s Degree in History at the National University of Malaysia (UKM). Currently, I am attempting to write a book about world history and a PhD proposal about the history of the Chinese Communist rule in Tibet. Thus, here is my draft PhD proposal about the Chinese Communist rule in Tibet as stated below. Also, I had put my University exam results and my CV below. Moreover, I would like to meet you via Zoom. However, as I am working from Mondays to Fridays, I only can have a meeting with you on Saturday (9:00pm) Malaysia time. Would that be alright for you?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon

Regards

Kooi Eng Chong

That’s nice, except he keeps threatening to enclose his PhD proposal, and never does. Even if he had, I’m not interested. I don’t know why he would think I would care, and I have no idea what he wants from me, but he keeps scheduling Zoom meetings. Every few weeks, he sends us a message asking why I didn’t show up or reply and asking to arrange a meeting again. Here’s a sampling of his tedious and frequent messages.

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has been two and a half months already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you? If you can’t make it then you can contact me via my phone number: xxxx xxxx xxx. Would that be alright for you?

Regards

Kooi Eng Chong

Email: [email protected]

On Sunday, 1 October 2023 at 09:53:18 am MYT, Kooi Chong wrote:

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has been nearly four months already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you? If you can’t make it then you can contact me via my phone number: xxxx xxxxx xxx. Would that be alright for you?

Regards

Kooi Eng Chong

Email: [email protected]

On Friday, 2 June 2023 at 10:12:54 pm GMT+8, Kooi Chong wrote:

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has been a month already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon

Regards

Kooi Eng Chong

Email: [email protected]

On Sunday, 23 April 2023 at 09:58:46 am GMT+8, Kooi Chong wrote:

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has been a month already and I still haven’t receive a reply from you. May I know why is it taking so long? Also, may I know when can I have a Zoom meeting with you?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon

Regards

Kooi Eng Chong

There are more, many more. I haven’t replied to any of them, nor will I — he’s very bot-like, and I have no idea what he’s trying to do. On the remote possibility that he’s a real human being, hunched over his computer in his apartment, sending out plaintive requests for human contact, scanning the internet for some hint that anyone recognizes his existence, I post this that he might discover that yes, a person has heard his cry.

And that he might learn this is the wrong fucking way to to anything.

If it is just a stupid bot, the most likely possibility, I’m letting it know that next week I’ll add a filter that’ll disintegrate all of its email before I even see it.

Bye, Kooi.