I forced myself to step away from my work yesterday, and refused to even think about classes for a day. It was marvelous! I spent the day only doing things that sparked joy…which for me is setting a very low bar, so I tidied up my home office — there are still a lot of cables around here, but at least they’re tucked away — and went for a walk and read a book (fiction!) and cooked a light dinner and went to bed around 10, and even my dreams spurned any consideration of lectures and labs.

This morning I continued the trend and went into the lab for a while and tended to the spiders (still sparking joy), and now I’m relaxing in front of my better organized computer, enjoying (???) the news. Twitter continues its decline, with Musk lifting the bans on Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump, becoming even more of a garbage dump. And I don’t care! I think I’ll continue my policy of blithe sanguinity for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I’ll have to slap myself back into dogged work and cynical disappointment in the state of the world, but that’s tomorrow. Today, I play a little more.

In case you were wondering where I’ve been, this has been a killer of a week. Grading, multiple committees and meetings, registration advising, lots of late nights at work, little sleep, and getting ready for finals in a few weeks…and yesterday was just peak awful. I was just focused on classes all day, trying to get everything in shape.

So today I have resolved not to do my job at all. No classwork. No cell biology prep. Nothin’. I’m going to go for a walk in the snow, and then kick back and relax all day by, for a change, forgetting that I’m employed at all. I’ll think of something fun to do…although, I’m also thinking of maybe cleaning up my home office desk. Cables are taking over everything.

I know what race I’d play: hoplings!

What do you think? Thief? Maybe ranger?

I agree with this sentiment.

In the last four years I've become an "angry optimist" living by the concept of "militant decency." A fellow Terry Pratchett fan puts it best: pic.twitter.com/HqWqwcHTfZ

— Donna Dickens (Not Parody) (@MildlyAmused) November 15, 2022

What are you waiting for? Get angry, just be careful to aim it at the right targets.

The omens suggest it’s going to be a rough season.

Flu season is here — and early red flags suggest it’s on track to be very, very bad. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Flu View report show extraordinarily high numbers of positive flu tests reported to the agency from labs around the US. As of November 5, nearly 14,000 positive flu tests had been reported, as shown in the orange line on the below chart. That’s more than 12 times the number reported at the same time in 2019 (shown in the black line).

Combined with COVID-19 and RSV, I’m anticipating a lot of hospitals are going to be clogged up, so don’t get sick for any reason. Just stay healthy. Vaccines will help.

You know what else would help? Masking. That seems to be a lost cause right now, unfortunately.

The news is mostly politics and Twitter right now, so here’s a dose of perspective.

Apple finished Wednesday’s session with a $2.31 trillion market cap, according to Yahoo! Finance data. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta were worth a combined $2.3 trillion. Meta’s meltdown, of course this year, backed– or helping to drive that underperformance there. Big Apple, though, indeed the winner.

These absurdly rich companies are happily sliding under the radar while Elon Musk is distracting everyone. Tax them all more.

Boy, I remember when everyone was predicting that Apple was going to decline into irrelevance.

The first step in making money with Twitter is to drive away all those scientists. They’re so critical!

Still, with uncertainty about how Twitter will change under Musk, many of the thousands of medical and scientific experts on the platform have started to look for alternatives or are considering giving up on social media altogether. For a while the hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter and #TwitterMigration were trending, and many researchers have been posting their new Mastodon handles, encouraging others to follow them to the site, which has gained more than 100,000 new users within days of Musk completing his purchase.

For the moment, most researchers are waiting to see what happens with Twitter. “I’m hedging my bets with a Mastodon account but not planning to leave in the short term,” says biologist Carl Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom, 163,000 followers) of the University of Washington, Seattle. Many other researchers are doing the same. That means even if little changes for now, the groundwork is being laid for what could quickly become a digital mass migration of scientists.

Once those old crotchety stick-in-the-muds are gone, Twitter will prosper. Just like when chasing away those computer scientists made it possible to sell dancing serfs as robots, and making the neuroscientists roll their eyes at Neuralink opened the door to brain surgery on his fans, and horrifying space science realists makes it possible to sell seats on a rocket to millionaires, Musk has a grand plan. By antagonizing all the rational people, he’s left with a market packed with fools — it’s like those Nigerian prince scams, where the skeptics get turned off by the subject line, but if the mark reads through a whole paragraph, you know you’ve got a potential sucker.

Like Bergstrom, I’m staying on Twitter for now — for the lulz, if nothing else — but I also have a backup plan with an account on mastodon that I set up 5 years ago (I’m on octodon.social/@pzmyers, if you want to track me down). There, I’ve noticed a recent flood of familiar science-related names showing up, which is nice. It’s always been a pleasant crowd over there, but I was sad that I had to go to Twitter to hang out with most of my science-related online pals, and now Twitter is becoming less and less essential.

By the way, if you find Mastodon confusing, DrSkySkull has written a short guide.

Excellent — it’s even gender-neutral, so I can send it to my wife. You can send it to your beloved, no matter who they are!