It’s the first day of the semester: first class, first lab, and coincidentally, first day of interviewing candidates for a chemistry position. It all begins at 8:30 this morning, and doesn’t stop until May.
I’m going to need some hard spider videos to get my day started.
In what I consider among the most cringeworthy videos of all time, a whole family of arachnophobes notice a small house spider on the ceiling, and freak out. There is much screaming and whining and indecision by daddy chickenshit, mama chickenshit, and a couple of shrieking baby chickenshits. They should all be ashamed.
I include the video just to document how stupid these people are, but I don’t recommend actually watching it — there’s way too much over-the-top drama over a harmless animal.
You’re going to hate me for this, but when someone tells me they’re afraid of spiders, I’ll always picture these people in my head.
I’m not going to take advice from anyone with the word “alpha” in their username, a rule that seems to work fairly robustly.
It’s strange that anyone would have such a binary view of how women should be. You know that it’s possible to appreciate spiders without chugging beer and smashing cans on your forehead, right? And that arachnophobia isn’t a parameter on the femininity spectrum? People are more complex than that.
But who am I to talk? My vision of idealized femininity was fixed in the 1960s.
I wonder what she thinks of spiders? I’m pretty sure she would have seen them as one of our fellow creatures, man, you know, like part of nature.
Siouxsie Wiles explains the sneaky shenanigans behind COVID PR. It’s literally PR for the disease.
In late 2020, the WHO started naming Covid-19 variants after letters of the Greek alphabet. Omicron was the letter given to the variant that emerged in late 2021.
Just looking at the data on the cumulative number of confirmed Covid cases worldwide, which we know is an underestimate, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Omicron has probably infected more people in the last year than caught Covid in the first two years of the pandemic put together.
All those Omicron infections mean the virus has also continued to evolve, but so far, the WHO hasn’t given any of the Omicron offshoots a new Greek letter. That’s why the world has been drowning in an alphabet soup of Omicron subvariants, from the BA’s and BJ’s to the BQ’s and XBB’s. I guess if we gave any one of them a new Greek letter, it would spoil the idea that the pandemic is over, and we don’t have to worry about Covid any more.
You’d think the dead bodies would be a clue — China has revealed that they’ve had 60,000 deaths since December — but no, we’re all in denial. A few people are trying to bring attention to an ongoing problem.
Inspired by someone on Twitter who nicknamed BA.2.75 Centaurus, last year Professor Ryan Gregory, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, started compiling a list of nicknames for Omicron subvariants based on mythological creatures. Which is easier to remember? That BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1 combined to form XBB, which evolved into XBB.1, and then XBB.1.5? Or that Argus and Mimas combined to form Gryphon, which evolved into Hippogryph and then into Kraken?
It’s something, I guess, but I feel like tactics to draw the public’s attention to our evolving pandemic aren’t going to be effective if the public simply doesn’t care. The general citizenry is just opposed to taking any action to slow the spread of the disease. No one is asking much — Siouxsie explains what a common sense response would be.
Am I concerned about Kraken? Regular readers will know I take all variants seriously. What concerns me more is that we are no longer working collectively to reduce the spread of Covid.
That doesn’t mean I want us to return to the days of lockdowns. I just want us to use the tools we know to reduce the transmission of not just every variant of Covid so far, but also many other airborne infectious diseases – high-quality masks, clean air and staying home when infectious. We’ll reap the rewards in the long run.
“Masks”? Tyranny!
Robert Garcia, a newly-elected Democratic representative, has chosen the book upon which he will swear the oath of office, and it is not a Bible.
Like any other lawmaker, Rep.-elect Robert Garcia will swear his oath of office on a foundational text. He chose the US Constitution over the Bible or another religious book, and when the time comes, he’ll also take his oath with three sentimental items, including the first edition comic of Superman.
“I’ve read almost all genres, but Superman is always the character that stood out and spoke to me the most,” Garcia, a Democrat from California, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday.
Reporters on Tuesday spotted the vintage comic book among the items laid out in the House of Representatives in preparation of the swearing-in of newly elected members. In a tweet, Garcia, who describes himself as a comic book nerd in his Twitter bio, acknowledged it was for him. He said he will be sworn in to Congress with the Constitution as well as a photograph of his parents, who both died during the pandemic; his naturalization paperwork from when he became a US citizen; and the first edition of Superman, which he borrowed from the Library of Congress.
I’m happy to see that someone chose something wholesome, rather than that archaic book of misogyny, racism, and violence. Immigrants have to stick together, too.
Genetics class begins this week, and I am ready for the first week. Syllabus: done. This week’s lectures: done. This week’s lab: done. I can sit back and relax and maybe go for a walk today, that bit of stress is gone.
Now the lab for the second week…that’s another story. That week the students are supposed to start breeding flies, and I got my fly stocks all set up in December, and I was supposed to be at the stage of expanding the colony to have a surplus in time to hand them out. Some of the lines have been duds. Wild type flies are doing fine, the scarlet mutants are proliferating like gangbusters, but the white miniature forked mutants are barely getting by, and I’m down to a handful of brown flies, because they keep dying off. Fresh stocks have been ordered, but I’m going to be cutting it close — every step in these crosses has to be carefully timed in order to get results that don’t conflict with those stupid interruptions in our schedule, like spring break.
So I’m fine this week except that I’m going to be panicking about next week. There’s always something to elevate my anxiety.
Nick Bostrom paced about his chambers, agitated and offended. The puling mob had accused him of racism for merely writing Blacks are more stupid than whites
in his youth, and then refusing to admit that thinking entire ethnic groups, nay, even the population of whole continents, could be genetically inferior was racism. It was science! He was not going to repudiate Science!
He must rebuke these irrational people. They are distracting him from his important work. He must deliver a stunning riposte. He considers the most effective way to crush them. He shall accuse them of being…mewling infants? Lowing beasts? No — they are buzzing insects.
Hunkering down to focus on completing a book project (not quite announcement-ready yet). Though sometimes I have the impression that the world is a conspiracy to distract us from what’s important – alternatively by whispering to us about tempting opportunities, at other times by buzzing menacingly around our ears like a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos.
Perfect. Accusing those damned SJWs of being a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitos
will strike exactly the right chord with his fanbase of libertarian/conservative free speech warriors.
Buzz, buzz, buzz.
This is a good time of year to just vanish — take a long walk into the empty fields around here, hunker down in a bit of brush, and freeze to death as the snow covers your corpse. Or fall into a frigid river and drown under the ice. There are lots of ways to go, and I’m not even considering the nefarious actions of evil-doers.
But now the Columbia Journalism Review has posted an an analysis of how much press your disappearance is worth. I took the little quiz which gathers your age, race, and sex and determines how interested the press would be in your demise. As it turns out, not very.
That settles it. I won’t plan on wandering off to die mysteriously any time in the near future. It’s just not worth it.
So what’s your newsworthiness? I have the advantage of being white, but the local newspapers aren’t going to get worked up over the fact of another old man disappearing.
This weekend, the crew at Freethoughtblogs is going to be all sweetness and light for an hour, as relief from the drudgery of winter.
Admire this work of art.
That’s beautiful.
As you’ve probably heard, Cardinal Pell is dead and will be buried in the Vatican tomorrow. The news has been strange — I’m not seeing much talk about his child sex abuse history, since he was acquitted, after all. All was forgiven, the Catholic church was relieved to be let off the hook.
On the day of Pell’s acquittal in 2020, Francis offered his morning Mass for all those who suffer from unjust sentences, which he compared to the persecution of Jesus.
Ironic, then, that the latest scandal is the discovery of a memo written by Pell.
Australian Cardinal George Pell was lying in state on Friday, with funeral preparations overshadowed by revelations that he was the author of an anonymous memo that branded Pope Francis’ pontificate a catastrophe.
You don’t expect loyalty from a junkyard dog, do you? He was just a mean-spirited, nasty little man. He was the kind of rabid conservative who hated science and did immense harm to society.
The late Cardinal George Pell left a legacy of climate science denial which – in his later years – became ever more distanced from reality and the position of the Catholic church.
For decades in newspaper columns and speeches, Pell popularised climate denial talking points to dismiss the science of global heating and to brand environmentalists as hysterical and in the grip of a pseudo-religion.
What’s impressive is that Pell was one of the few people who could make a positive contribution to humanity by simply dropping dead.
