Exploring Mars the smart way

Let’s get my usual negativity out of the way: I don’t think humans will ever be capable of sustained living in space. We’re too fragile and to highly adapted to those little things, like, oh, gravity and air pressure and specific proportions of oxygen and CO2. Short term, maybe, but I see the toll it takes on astronauts living in orbit for a few months, and I have to wonder why we’re even trying to build space stations. Elon Musk is never going to colonize Mars, he’s just recruiting victims for the most expensive death trap ever.

Here’s what I do like, though: robots. More robots! Robots can be designed to function in all those environments that we’d be nuts to try and live in. NASA has been fantastic at building robots, and space robots really ought to be what NASA does.

So hooray for Perseverance!

I also appreciate that they’re using this robot to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars.

Scientists believe that, around 3.5 billion years ago the Jezero crater – where Perseverance was sent – was home to a river that flowed into a lake and deposited sediment in a fan-shaped delta. They hoped it could harbour fossilised microorganisms the rover could find evidence of.

However, before the landing, there were some nerves about Jezero crater as a destination. Mr Chen said: “It’s full of the stuff that scientists want to see but stuff that I don’t want to land on.”

I’m a little disappointed that, near as I can tell, they’re relying on visual analysis with a suite of fancy cameras — you’re not going to find out much about bacteria with that. They’re caching the samples and are going to have another lander fetch and return with them? I want to see that.

Of course, if they find the Martian version of a trilobite, I guess high-quality images will be enough (they won’t, but it would be cool.)

You go to a panel discussion, and then discover the other panelists are promoting a eugenics article from Areo

I am done with this discussion at last. Now I have to get cracking on my genetics lecture for tomorrow. It never ends! (No, it does sort of end. I get a four day weekend, beginning at 12:50pm tomorrow, so I will catch up.)

Anyway, I include my part of the panel below. I kept it mostly cool, except at the end I blew up a little — the article we were given to prompt the discussion was crap from Areo, AKA Quillette Junior, and I was furious. Why? There were two philosophers on the panel. They could have suggested any of a number of serious philosophy articles by reputable bioethicists, and instead we got an article by a known eugenicist/HBD wackaloon/racist. So I called them out at the end. It’s that so many people were completely oblivious to the rancid eugenic thought permeating the whole article.

Not that it mattered. One of them continued to reference Jonathan Anomaly throughout. Ugh. We should have higher standards than that.

[Read more…]

Go count birds!

The Great Backyard Bird Count has begun today, and continues through the 15th. My wife has been staring out the window all day, scribbling notes on paper, and I might have wondered what weirdness she’s up to, except that she just told me I should tell everyone in the world to join her. Not in our backyard, that would get crowded, but in your own backyard. I’m exempt, because she knows I only count spiders. And dinosaurs.

Fly Time was a bust

That was agonizing. My students have projects ongoing, so I leave the lab open so they can get in and work with their flies. I go in early in the morning specifically to unlock it.

Someone locked it back up again after I left!

Students were backed up, trying to get in, and were frantically phoning and messaging me!

While I was trying to teach my other class!

It was agonizing: non-stop ringing and beeping while I’m trying to deliver a lecture, and it wasn’t so much that the noise bothered me, but that I couldn’t just ditch one class to help another, and so I couldn’t answer or do anything about it. I finally broke down and ran into the other room to ask my long-suffering wife to take my keys and unlock it for them. I’ve now posted prominent signs telling people not to lock it during class hours.

I guess I should be grateful for diligent staff who maintain our security, and for eager, ambitious students, but wow was that a stressful class hour.

(For that matter, this pandemic has already pushed my stress levels off the charts.)

We’re on fly time now, boys and girls

My new regime begins today, and it’s one of the awkwardnesses of teaching a fly genetics lab. Mere human schedules don’t work; I informed the students from the very beginning that we’re going to be at the mercy of the flies’ schedule, and they have a roughly 9 day generation time, which doesn’t align well with our 7 day class cycle.

So what do we do? The class becomes more of an exercise in independent study. We have the regularly scheduled lab time, which I use to explain where we should be at and what to do in the next week, and then I open up the lab early every morning so they can come in whenever they want. I’m also posting my personal cell phone number on the door so they can call me at any time to come over (it’s not at all far, fortunately) — I’ll be requesting no calls after midnight, though. So starting now, I am on Fly Time and Student Time.

Which means I have to zip over to the lab right now.

Man, it would be handy to have one of those Time Tacos.

Flies have pretty eyes

I made a quick trip to the lab this morning (it’s -25°C! I walked quickly!) to take some fly photos for this week’s genetics lab. The students are doing a simple complementation assay with fly eye colors — can you tell which one is scarlet (st) and which one is brown (bw)? Every year it’s a struggle to get them to recognize even obvious mutations like these, but it’s not the students’ fault. This is their first time working with flies, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the alienness of Drosophila.

Me, I’m always impressed with how beautiful their eyelashes are.

Of course, immediately after their glamorous photo shoot, these flies were sacrificed on the altar of the spider gods.

Oh joy, first exam

This week, I gave my first exam of the semester — a take-home, with ten multi-part questions requiring lots of calculations and and statistical tests, and I required that all answers by typed and in a specific format. It was due last night at midnight.

Nobody took the hint. I got 100% on-time submissions, so this morning I’m looking at a big stack of pages of numbers and formulas and explanations and hard work that I have to get evaluated this weekend.

Why didn’t you guys tell me to make it all multiple choice and true/false? I’m blaming you all. You need to come to my house and grade them for me.