I am disappointed to learn that another robot has ended its mission — the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Scott Manley breaks down the details.
Wow, those are some amazing shots of Martian landscapes, too. Send more probes!
It happened again. Monday rolled around. When will Science master the ability to predict these cataclysmic disasters? Surely there is some cause that we can treat. Vaccinations, maybe? Monday shelters, buried deep underground? Is there a pesticide that will selectively kill off all Mondays?
Once again, I’ve done it to myself: I set up all the material for my classes for the students on Monday, which effectively means my weekends are shot. This week we’re finishing up The Triple Helix with a conversation about the limitations of reductionism, Wednesday we discuss strategies for answering thorny research problems, and Friday we’re reading a paper about snake ecology, development, and evolution that takes a multidisciplinary approach. I’ve got it all queued up, almost as if I have a plan and know what I’m doing. I’m also tired, bleary-eyed, and I have a headache.
It is all my fault. The easy thing to have done would be to trundle through a series of lectures in which the students sit back with glazed eyes and absorb my wisdom, but instead I’m setting up frameworks and making the students do most of the work, at least two out of three classes. It turns out that’s far more work than just telling them what they need to know, so Mondays are going to be my days of pain.
The rest of the week, though, is cake. Mostly. Then this weekend I have to prep for next week, when we dive into the first chapter of our eco-devo textbook. Plasticity. Plasticity, plasticity, plasticity. That’ll keep us busy for a while.
Also, every day is grading day, and Tuesdays and Friday mornings are my spider days. I’ll recover tomorrow.
Class went fairly well this afternoon, mainly because I’ve got a good, engaged bunch of students. The omens bode well for a good semester.
Me, lecturing
I was also feeling a bit dehydrated. I’m going to start bringing a water bottle to work and take regular swigs throughout the day. Minnesota winters don’t help much, either: humidity bottoms out when it’s this cold, as my spiders will attest.
Today is my actual first day of classes. We had MLK Day off, and I have no classes on Tuesday, and today I get to meet the 12 students in my Ecological Developmental Biology course. It should be fun. I plan to present that famous aphorism by Van Valen, “Evolution is the control of development by ecology,” and then I’m done for the entire semester — once they’ve grasped that, there is nothing else left to teach, so we can just coast through February, March, April, and May.
OK, so maybe we should also think about the details. We’re going to spend the first two weeks diving into Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. It’s short but clears the stage beautifully of any vestige of genetic determinism and primes us with an introduction to some fundamental concepts. Everyone ought to read it!
The rest of the semester we’ll work through Gilbert and Epel’s Ecological Developmental Biology. We’re going to talk about plasticity, epigenetics, symbiosis, developmental physiology, and the book has lots of material on teratogenesis, cancer, and aging (those are all developmental concerns, you know — we’re doing all the interesting and important stuff).
We’re also going to dig into the primary literature. This week, we’re reading a review by Sultan, “Development in context: the timely
emergence of eco-devo” to get everyone filled in with the background, but subsequent weeks will be mainly about primary research papers. There’s going to be a fair amount of reading in this class!
I’ve also made the radical decision to abolish all exams: about 60% of the grade is derived from just showing up, alert and ready to contribute. We’ll see how well that flies.
I’ll let you know. I’m thinking I’ll try to post a weekly wrap-up here, so that if I fail it’ll be visible.
I’m working on my class policy for next semester. Last semester was rough — I had bent over backwards to provide maximum flexibility, with an online option and no mandatory attendance, and it was fairly typical to have only half, or less, of the class show up. I considered changing the policy mid-semester, but it was written into the syllabus, so I had to stick with it. There will be changes next term, I tell you what.
This little video illustrates my problem.
I really like the prisoner’s dilemma twist in the middle — if only one student shows up, they pass the course and everyone else fails. There was one day fall term where that could have been invoked.
To answer the question in the title: yes, I’m going to take attendance, and it’s going to count. My big class this spring is going to be heavily interactive, and I’ll need people to show up.
I’ve even submitted all of the grades to the registrar.
Please clap.
(I don’t think the students will.)
What can I say? All that matters in the long run is the population — vaporizing a few individuals now and then is irrelevant, as long as the numbers don’t rise to statistical significance.
iNaturalist does this thing where they’ll give you a graphical summary of your contributions in the past year. Here’s mine.
See all the orange? That’s what they use to color-code arachnid observations. I might have a little bit of a bias there, and I have no idea how any birds and mammals crept in there, and I’m afraid plants don’t exist in my universe. Still, despite my narrow focus, I spotted 68 species this year. That’s not at all impressive. Can you name 68 species? Apparently, I can, and I’ve even photographed them.
I’ve been terrible at contributing identifications, that is, helping others by identifying what’s in their photos. I should aspire to do better at that next year.
Maybe I can strive to look at something other than spiders in the coming year, too, although that might be difficult, since they’re not as interesting.
I was complaining about the effect of Zoom on students — it doesn’t encourage engagement and leads to apathy — and oh, look, someone did a study on “zoom fatigue”.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, looked for physiological signs of fatigue in 35 students attending lectures on engineering at an Austrian university. Half of the class attended the 50-minute lecture via videoconference in a nearby lab and a face-to-face lecture the following week, while the other half attended first in person, then online.
Participants were monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) instruments that recorded electrical activity in the brain and their heart rhythms. They also participated in surveys about their mood and fatigue levels.
The researchers searched for physical changes correlated with mental fatigue, including distinctive brain waves, reduced heart rate and hints the nervous system might be trying to compensate for growing exhaustion during the lecture.
There were “notable” differences between the in-person and online groups, the researchers write. Video participants’ fatigue mounted over the course of the session, and their brain states showed they were struggling to pay attention. The groups’ moods varied, too, with in-person participants reporting they felt livelier, happier and more active, and online participants saying they felt tired, drowsy and “fed up.”
Overall, the researchers write, the study offers evidence of the physical toll of videoconferencing and suggests that it “should be considered as a complement to face-to-face interaction, but not as a substitute.”
I know, that’s a tiny n, tested on a yet another WEIRD group. I also think that for Zoom to work, you have to completely revamp how you teach, and this is obviously just presenting the same content in two different media. Given those problems with the study though, it aligns with my personal experience, and I’ll use it to further justify my decision to cut Zoom out of my life next semester.
Lectures are boring unless you can get some questions and other interactions during it, and I’ve noticed that, when I make my in-person lectures simultaneously available over Zoom, I get zero responsiveness from the online part of the class. I suspect I’ve put them all to sleep.
Winning a Nobel prize does not mean you are a smart guy. It means you have a lot of in-depth knowledge about a very specific, narrow scientific domain, and it’s bad news when people treat you as a universal oracle.
I remind people that Jim Watson and William Shockley were horrible racist bigots — they just knew a bit about the structure of DNA or how transistors work. Kary Mullis was a super flaky space cadet who had an insight into DNA replication. Don’t bother asking them how any other aspect of the universe works.
Now I’ve got another example of bad Nobelists: John Clauser. He won a Nobel in 2022 for his work on quantum mechanics, and I’ll trust that he knew his stuff. Unfortunately, now he’s decided that he’s an expert in climate change. Great news! There is no climate crisis!
he says.
During a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel here Tuesday, speakers denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal” including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and many leaders of the Catholic Church.
It might have seemed like a fringe event, except for one speaker’s credentials. John F. Clauser had shared the Nobel Prize in physics last year before declaring Tuesday that “there is no climate crisis” — a claim that contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus.
The event showcased the remarkable shift that Clauser, 80, has undergone since winning one of the world’s most prestigious awards for his groundbreaking experiments with light particles in the 1970s. His recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency.
Clauser, who has a booming voice and white hair he often leaves uncombed, has brushed off these concerns. He contends that skepticism is a key part of the scientific process.
I like my skepticism informed and based on evidence, thank you very much. You don’t just run around denying things — you have to actually do the work of showing that those things are wrong. This is a case where someone is making “skeptical” claims on the basis of a false authority and ego. So what is Clauser’s argument?
Clauser, who has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change, has homed in on one message in particular: The Earth’s temperature is primarily determined by cloud cover, not carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, so there is no climate crisis.
I had to go looking for the scientific basis for this claim, and I found it. It’s NASA. On a site called Climate Kids, it’s for children who want to know more about climate science, so it’s a good match for Clauser’s level of understanding.
Clouds within a mile or so of Earth’s surface tend to cool more than they warm. These low, thicker clouds mostly reflect the Sun’s heat. This cools Earth’s surface.
Clouds high up in the atmosphere have the opposite effect: They tend to warm Earth more than they cool. High, thin clouds trap some of the Sun’s heat. This warms Earth’s surface.
What about when you look at the effect of all clouds together? Cooling wins. Right now, Earth’s surface is cooler with clouds than it would be without the clouds.
Uh-oh…he’s right? Not really. The site goes on to say,
Climate scientists predict that as Earth’s climate warms, there will also be fewer clouds to cool it down. So, unfortunately, we can’t count on clouds alone to slow down the warming.
I’d also point out that clouds are only one factor in climate, and I’d need a quantitative understanding of the relative contributions of clouds vs., for instance, greenhouse gasses. I’d want to get the opinion of a genuine expert in the field, a real climatologist. Like Michael Mann.
Michael Mann, a professor of earth science at the University of Pennsylvania, said this argument is “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience.”
The “best available evidence” shows that clouds actually have a net warming effect, Mann said in an email. “In physics, we call that a ‘sign error’ — it’s the sort of error a freshman is embarrassed to be caught having made,” he said.
Of course, does Michael Mann have a Nobel prize in quantum mechanics? He does not. All he has is relevant expertise in the actual field in question, but no shiny gold medal.
In other embarrassing revelations, we also learn something else about Clauser.
Tuesday’s event was organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of more than a dozen Catholic organizations that argues “those pushing the anti-God and anti-family climate agenda need to be called out and exposed,” according to its website. Clauser, who is an atheist, needed some convincing to be the keynote speaker, a coalition spokesman acknowledged.
Have I ever mentioned that it’s not just Nobelists, but also sometimes atheists can be big fucking idiots?
