Minnesota is feeling increasingly special

I don’t know how people can stand to live in some of those other states — you know, the Republican states. Some people can’t, and they’re starting to leave places like Texas to move to colder but more welcoming states like ours.

The family moved 1,200 miles to St. Paul last summer after Texas took steps to limit pediatric access to gender-affirming care and investigate parents who sought it for transgender children.

“It got very bad, very quickly,” she said.

Advocates expect more families to move to Minnesota, which has positioned itself as a refuge while other states have restricted access by transgender people to bathrooms, sports teams and medical care. Minnesota, under its new “shield law,” won’t support any state’s prosecution of parents or doctors providing gender-affirming care for children.

They’re coming to us from the usual suspects…Texas, Florida.

A Florida dad limited his search to six states with shield laws and job prospects after deciding that his home state had become hostile to his 8-year-old transgender boy.

“The rhetoric started to ramp up and we could envision a time that we needed to move and decided to be proactive,” said the father, Daniel, who moved to St. Paul. He spoke on condition that only his first name be published, because his wife and children are finishing the school year in Miami.

If you’re interested in escaping your local hell hole, Transforming Families Minnesota seems to be one place you can contact. They also have a useful list of resources.

It’s going to get crowded if everyone moves here, though. A better solution would be for everyone’s state to kick the haters out of power and make your own local Minnesota. Until that miracle occurs, though, please do move North. You make this place even better.

Haw haw haw

Ken Ham was asked if Muslims are going to hell. His answer:

Well, it doesn’t matter if one is a Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Muslim, Methodist, Hindu, Sikh, Orthodox Jew, or any other denomination or religious group—if a person has not repented of sin and received the free gift of salvation offered through the Lord Jesus Christ (being “born again”), they will be separated from God for eternity in a place the Bible calls hell. And sadly, the majority of people will go there as Jesus warned, ‘Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many’ (Matthew 7:13).

Shorter Ken Ham: yes.

It is all out of my hands now

My exams look nothing like this. I must be doing them wrong.

I’ve been giving open book, open notes, online exams with no proctors, no timing, nothin’ but “here’s some questions, have fun answering them” for the last few years, prompted in part by the pandemic. I like it this way. It de-emphasizes rote memorization and requires them to understand the concepts (it also requires me to ask questions that can’t be answered with a recitation or regurgitation.) I also encourage them to study together and collaborate on figuring it all out — although they are required to write answers in their own words, no copying and pasting.

Anyway, all of my final exams are now written and posted to our Canvas site, and I have nothing more to do. Until Friday at 6pm, that is, when all these exams come winging back to me, demanding my immediate attention.

I think I’ll go for a walk.

Will not achieve today’s goals

I had planned to get both of my finals written today, but only finished the one for introductory biology. Even at that, it was frustrating: I had a set length to reach, a reasonable number of questions, and I had so many I had to cut them back by half. Alternatively, I could have thrown lengthy essay questions at them that were worth only a half point each. I’m not that cruel.

The genetics final will have to wait until tomorrow morning, because it’s only 4pm and my brain is worn out.

Sorry, genetics students. You weren’t in a hurry for this, were you?

The end of a stressalicious semester

Today is officially the last day of instruction, but there won’t be much instruction going on — it’s all administrative stuff for me, acquainting students with the record of their past performance, pointing at the specter of the imminent final exam like a ghost of Christmases yet to be, polishing up that final exam and posting it for them to procrastinate and worry over, the usual bad time at the end of a difficult school year.

Next year will be better, right?

It could be worse. Look at these spider photoreceptors!

It turns out that if spiders aren’t properly fed, their photoreceptors start to die off.

Researchers looked at the bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax), a common species that relies very much on light-sensitive photoreceptors in its large eyes to spot prey. When the spiders don’t get enough nutrients, these photoreceptors can be lost.

“Photoreceptors are energetically costly,” says biologist Elke Buschbeck from the University of Cincinnati. “It’s hard to keep up with their energy needs.”

“If you deprive them of nutrition, the system fails. It’s the functional equivalent of the macula in our eyes.”

See, if I don’t have enough research time to take care of my spider colony, they might go blind. I’ll run that by the administration and see if I can get a reduction in teaching load.*

*Note: it will not work.

Blatant both-siderism from a physicist

A lot of people have been asking me to comment on a recent video by Sabine Hossenfelder. I knew who she is — she is a science communicator who specializes in physics, and I’ve seen a few of her videos. They were OK, not particularly interesting to me, just because I’m on the biology side of the spectrum. Great, though, more people talking about science is a net positive.

But then she did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.

I took a look. I only made it 34 seconds into the video before I closed it and said, “Fuck this.” This is how she opens:

On the one side you have people claiming that it’s a socially contagious fad among the brainwashed woke who want to mutilate innocent children. On the other side there are those saying it’s saving the lives of minorities who have been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people like you and I who think both sides are crazy and could someone summarize the facts in simple words, which is what I am here for.

I am done. I’ll never be able to watch another of her videos. You’d think a physicist would at least understand logic, but there’s the fallacy of the false dilemma coupled to a bad case of physicist’s arrogance. It’s both-siderism with a vengeance. She claims to be all about No hype, no spin, but she just made a false equivalence between people who are trying to legislate invasive, destructive meddling in people’s lives, and people who want to be left alone to live their lives without interference, and calls both of them crazy. That she thinks the right to live a life without being tortured by religious fanatics is crazy is most definitely taking a side and putting a fierce spin on her opinion.

Goodbye, Sabine.

And sorry to everyone who wanted me to comment on the rest of her ideas. There’s 27 more minutes of that crap and I just couldn’t bear to continue. I’m cis, and I have no idea how trans people can persist in a society where that kind of nonsense gets served up at you constantly.

While I’m weak and unable to stomach such stupidity, at least Rebecca Watson, the Iron Skeptic, managed to cope. Here’s her take on Hossenfelder.

Yeah, what she said. One the one side you have people who listen to a half-minute of Sabine Hossenfelder and then flip the table, and on the other side there are those who can hear her out and then run circles around her.

Is it Halloween already?

Bats and spiders…it makes me think of Halloween, anyway. I’ll stick a photo below the fold of a spider eating a bat so you can get into the festive spirit, too.

It seems there is a bit of a conflict going on in northern Australia, with bats snatching up spiders and spiders snaring bats.

Ms Maclean said there had been several other recorded incidents of bats caught in spider webs but, conversely, some microbats in the Far North were known to eat golden orb spiders out of their webs.

“[Golden-tipped bats] have two large teeth that are specially housed in the bottom jaw,” she said.

“They can tell which side of the web the spider’s in, they fly in, they grab the body of the spider with the teeth, and then they fly backwards out of the web with it.

“They kind of suck the contents of the abdomen out … they don’t particularly eat the legs and things.”

I don’t feel at all bad if a bat occasionally meets a grisly end.

[Read more…]

It’s called a bribe

It’s pretty simple, actually. Right-wingers have been bribing Clarence Thomas for years.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Harlan Crow has been celebrating this with his bought-and-paid for super-realistic art. It’s all the same small circle of cronies and their apologists.

It’s like a crime family. Charming.

One more day, I think

I’ve got a committee meeting coming up at 8am, and then I’m closeting myself in the office for the day to hammer out two final exams. Once I get that done, all my heavy responsibilities vanish until the end of next week, when those exams come back and I have to grade them.

I can do this. One big push, and then it’s a summer of spiders.