A seismic change

Today has been a day full of meetings (with another to come tonight!) and now I’m tired. One of the meetings gave me mixed feelings: a division meeting of all the science faculty to give our final approval of a decision to get rid of our geology discipline.

OK, that’s overly dramatic. We’re not actually getting rid of any of the geology classes, or any of the geology faculty, we just won’t be giving out geology degrees, and the existing structure of the discipline is getting folded into our Environmental Science program. Nothing will be lost, it’s more of an administrative shift, and apparently this is a common kind of change at many universities, but I still feel like it’s a historical break. Before there was a biology, there was geology, and geology was one of the core research fields in natural history. It’s being absorbed into a broader academic discipline, which is OK, I guess, but as an old guy I feel like something is being lost.

I wonder what will happen to biology in a few decades…what grander concept will expand to encompass my little domain?

Don’t tell me physics.

“renovations”

Donald Trump has announced that he is closing the Kennedy Center — pardon me, the Trump Kennedy Center — for two years starting this July. This is for necessary renovations, he says. He also says he’s awaiting approval from the board.

The president said that this would take effect July 4, pending approval of the board, a group that he has appointed and made himself the chairman of.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a bold prediction that on July 5, he will start “renovating” with backhoes and bulldozers, that he will proceed with no plans for what renovations will be done other than a vague demand for more gold-plated geegaws, and further, that no one in congress will raise a hand in protest, and the laws regulating historical buildings in Washington DC will be ignored.

Another prediction: the building doesn’t actually need major renovations, but that this demolition will occur solely because artists around the world are cancelling engagements at anything with the Trump name on it, and he finds this embarrassing.

He really is determined to leave his mark on the country, even if it is only a mark of shame.

Why is conservative music so awful?

The Super Bowl is coming up! This weekend, I think, but I haven’t been paying much attention.

I don’t like football, and I don’t think I’ve ever watched it for the sports. I’ve tuned in to the half-time show a few times, and it’s always disappointing — there’s a musical act drowning in a sea of ridiculous commercials, and from what little I’ve seen of broadcast television, a lot of those ads will be for gambling services. No thank you, I’m well informed on how probability works. The musical act this time around is Bad Bunny, and I’ve liked what I’ve heard of his music, but not enough to wade through all the Super Crap.

But Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, so some people are furious that he’s featured on an all-American event — these are the same people so ignorant that they don’t realize that Puerto Rico is American. Apparently, we’ll have some counterprogramming available, from TPUSA, an anti-American white Christian nationalist organization.

Conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA has announced Kid Rock will headline its counterprogrammed halftime show, dubbed “The All-American Halftime Show,” when Bad Bunny takes the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show stage on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Along with Kid Rock, The “one-of-a-kind streaming event,” which will celebrate “American faith, family, and freedom,” will feature performances from “Bottoms Up” singer Brantley Gilbert, “I Drive Your Truck” singer Lee Brice, and “I Hope” singer Gabby Barret, according to a press release.

Oh god. That sounds awful. Couldn’t they sign up Lee Greenwood, even? They’re all country-western singers, my least favorite music genre, I’ve never even heard of the songs they mentioned, and Kid Rock is a washed-up hack. Television is going to be more of a dead wasteland to me on Sunday than it usually is.

Hey, I’m a washed-up hack, too — maybe I should schedule a livestream for that hour. I promise I won’t try to sing.

I’m in the Epstein files??!?

I decided to search for my name in the Epstein files, expecting nothing, and I’m mentioned in a couple of email messages. The two mentions are kind of pathetic. I was briefly included in one of John Brockman’s email list along with a swarm of other people, so when he wrote to Epstein, my name got incidentally dragged in. Nothing specific. No flights to sex islands. No sexcapades. I was just briefly one of the “cool kids”.

Very briefly. For a short time, I was regularly getting missives from various members of the new atheists and the scientific publishing industry, which was nice to be part of a community (although it also left me uneasy). Then, suddenly, they stopped. I was suddenly removed from the list with no fanfare, no announcement, not even a courtesy warning…I think it’s because I criticized Richard Dawkins.

It turns out the “cool kids club” is fragile and doesn’t allow much introspection.

Wheee, more Epstein revelations

A couple more letters emerge out of the files, these all involve John Brockman. Brockman was the king of scientific publishing; I believe he was the agent for all of Richard Dawkins’ books, and he was the agent for my one book, he was Lawrence Krauss’s agent, etc.\. If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal. He had a lot of clout, clout that was invisible to most people.

So when a “rather nasty young woman” criticized Richard Dawkins, he went crying to John Brockman.

> From: Richard Dawkins < [ A
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman < [
> Subject: Lawrence
>
> John
–
> 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
>
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists- everywhere/
>
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
>
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard

Apparently, Brockman had been making up excuses for Epstein to his clients, and then those clients were echoing those excuses to justify their own ugly behavior. I have no idea what Dawkins thought Brockman could do to help. It was just an incestuous little clique.

This next one is very much inside baseball. I was on Scienceblogs, along with a lot of other very good people, which was founded by Adam Bly, who was also connected to Brockman. Bly got a lot of money from somewhere, I don’t know where, enough to launch a blog networks and a print magazine, but this email suggests to me that one of his sources was Jeffrey Epstein. Now I feel tainted.

The “PR crisis” he’s talking about was PepsiGate. We were all scientists and journalists at ScienceBlogs, except that Bly had suddenly brought a new blog into the network, a great big corporate advertisement for Pepsi disguised as a science blog. It’s true, it was a crisis: several people people yeeted right out of the network, citing ethical issues, and even more of us were yelling at Bly that this was wrong, you can’t do that, it’s blurring the boundary between objective science and shilling for a corporation. It was really, really ugly, and Bly just seemed oblivious to our concerns. (Note also: those of you who remember this event know that it’s also where another blog, ERV, went histrionically pro-Pepsi and lurched into the manosphere. It was a weird time.)

Bly was consulting a convicted pedophile during the whole episode. I suspect said pedophile had provided some degree of seed money for the science magazine, Seed.

To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail com]
From: Adam Bly
Sent: Thur 7/812010 3:18:24 AM
Subject: Thurs.
I’m dealing with a PR crisis at ScienceBlogs (relating to a customer, PepsiCo) and haven’t left my office all day. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like Yet so wanted to give you a heads up in case I’m unable to leave the office again tomorrow.

I have copies of every issue of Seed stored in my house. I guess I won’t feel bad about throwing out the clutter at last.

I read a Chris Rufo post

And I regret it. Bet you didn’t know that Scandinavian-Americans are “over-empathetic” and that we’re a hotbed of “left-wing radicalism,” like that is a bad thing.

What explains why endemic disorder seems to plague Minneapolis? My pet theory is that if you look at the history of Minneapolis and compare it to the histories of other American cities that have similarly become hotbeds of left-wing radicalism and anarchy—say, Seattle—there are real commonalities. Both cities have a long history of powerful organized labor movements, factions of communist sympathizers, and a tradition of industrial-frontier progressivism. Each city also has a high density of Scandinavians. There’s something about Scandinavian transplant cultures that simultaneously brings an over-empathizing element—bring in as many Somalis as you can, don’t ask any rude questions about what they might be up to—and also a more militant, socialistic, progressive, and activist element.

He is such a dumbass.

It’s too much

More Epstein files have been released, and I’m sorry, I can’t bear to read any more about them. They confirm that the richest people in the country are all lying sex criminals. Bill Gates picked up an STD cavorting with Russian prostitutes, and wanted antibiotics he could sneak into his wife’s food? Trump was having sex with 14 year olds, and slapping them? Clinton and Prince Andrew were partying with “Jeff”? Elon Musk was requesting wild parties when visiting? Here’s a pre-digested summary, which is as deep as I want to go.

Take all the rich people in this country and throw them into a deep pit. I never want to hear from them again.

An unpleasant memory

I just had a flashback to my worst academic experience ever. I think it was a combination of my recent posts about all those scientists losing their jobs and that cool video of Pakistani mechanics cutting and shaping steel.

In the 1990s, I was an assistant professor at Temple University, and I had a magnificent custom microscopy rig. A top of the line Leica was at the heart of it, but I had modified the heck out of it. I’d built an air table — a massive 2cm thick sheet of steel resting on a cushion of tennis balls — that had been a huge effort to get cut and hauled up to my lab. I had hydraulic actuators for single cell injections. The microscope itself was modified with a motorized stage and a UV filter wheel (thanks to my friends at Applied Scientific Instrumentation, who are still in business, I’m pleased to see) all programmable and controlled by custom software I’d written. It was beautiful, and unique.

Unfortunately, I did not get tenure at Temple. You may not be aware of this, but if you’re hired by a university for a tenure track faculty position, and you do not get tenure, you’re done. You have one year to clear out your stuff, and then the axe falls, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. You’re a dead man walking, still ambling zombie-like about the university, still obligated to do your teaching and committee duties, but there’s a deadline ahead of you, at which time you have to vacate your office, your lab, everything, it all comes to an abrupt close.

Yeesh, but that was a miserable year, with all my former colleagues cutting ties. Fortunately, I landed another job in Minnesota, but that gorgeous microscope was not mine, it belonged to the university. I had to abandon it.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. At that time, there was a political crisis: HMOs were consolidating and going bankrupt, and many of them had associations with research universities that they were abruptly shutting down. Temple saw that they could buy up entire research groups for a song! It was time to shuffle out the peons working at their university already, and instead bring in all these big biomedical people who already had research grants. And so they did.

One day, in the waning days of my employment, a pair of these new hires walked into my lab, zeroed in on my microscope (that I was using at the time!), and started taking photos, writing down part numbers, and measuring stuff with a tape measure, while talking to each other about where they could put it in their lab space. They looked a bit puzzled by the filter wheel and the weird piezoelectric stage and the strange camera I was using, but they didn’t ask about any of it. They didn’t talk to me at all. They didn’t even acknowledge my existence. It was a strange experience that left me feeling like a ghost, and also sad, because these clueless twits were no doubt going to carve up my microscope for parts.

It was a dehumanizing experience that poisoned all my good memories of working at Temple. It did make me feel better about saying goodbye to that place.

Academia is a cruel and heartless beast, and overpaid biomedical researchers who lack the basics of human interaction are the worst.