Turning point in the war against my personal virus

I have been cold-free for the last couple of years, which is a desirable condition to be in. Then, almost a week and a half ago, my granddaughter showed up at my doorstep with a face full of snot. We let her in. We knew the price we would pay.

I’ve been miserably clogged up ever since. I was waking up 3 or 4 times a night, struggling to breathe. I was horking up thick, slimy mucus all the time, feeling exhausted and disgusting.

Last night, though was a welcome turning point. I slept a continuous 8 hours! I woke up still able to breathe! I’m still messily congested, but it’s clearly at the mop-up phase where I send macrophages armed with flamethrowers into the caves and tunnels of my face to torch the invaders. Yay! I might be back to normal in time for back-to-school.

Unfortunately, there is a more worrisome virus waiting in the wings: XBB-1.5.

Three years after the novel coronavirus emerged, a new variant, XBB.1.5, is quickly becoming the dominant strain in parts of the United States because of a potent mix of mutations that makes it easier to spread broadly, including among those who have been previously infected or vaccinated.

XBB.1.5, pegged by the World Health Organization as “the most transmissible” descendant yet of the omicron variant, rose from barely 2 percent of U.S. cases at the start of December to more than 27 percent the first week of January, according to new estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 70 percent of cases in the Northeast are believed to be XBB.1.5.

We must remain ever-vigilant. Mask up, everyone! I’m afraid my university administration, as well as the federal administration, are committed to downplaying all concerns. My university hasn’t changed their policies since last May, when they decided that nobody needed to wear a mask at all.

We’ve also got the usual idiots who understand neither evolution nor public health who have decided that new variants are caused by vaccination.

While there is no evidence so far that XBB.1.5 is more virulent than its predecessors, a recent swirl of misinformation linking the rise of new variants to vaccination has cast a spotlight on this latest strain and raised concern among some health experts that it could further limit booster uptake.

“XBB did not evolve because people were vaccinated,” said Vaughn Cooper, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The way it evolved, let’s be straight, is because people were infected by multiple viruses at the same time.”

Since the omicron variant ignited an explosion of cases last winter, it spawned a host of descendants that are even more adept at slipping past antibodies and caused most infections in the United States. The XBB line emerged as a result of two other omicron subvariants swapping parts.

Isn’t that obvious? I mean, you’ve got the responsible people who take every measure to avoid the disease, and then you’ve got the people who go to football games and Walmart without taking precautions, who end up being little ambulatory cauldrons mixing up multiple variants simultaneously, and then some bozo decides the emergence of the explosion of new mix-and-match variants must be the fault of the guy who got the vaccines and stayed home in a safe little bubble.

You know that bozo is going to be featured almost every night on Fox News and Newsmax, and is going to have a popular Facebook page, because the media are fucked.

Back to normal!

We’re winding down to the last week of our winter break, and Mary and I took off to the Big City for a few days. We had no grand plans, just a break from the routine, where we’d hang out in a hotel and do some exploring. Unfortunately, we got there immediately after a major storm dumped a dense layer of wet snow on the city. We arrived as the snow plows were clearing out places where we could park — and they weren’t done by the time we would leave. That cramped our style, since walking around the city was slogging through nearly impassable piles of thick soggy stuff. Our grand adventure was reduced to short walks to nice restaurants.

We also met up with Marcus Ranum, who was in Minneapolis to help a friend move. He drove a truck from Pennsylvania to Minnesota during a snowstorm! I want a friend like that, who’d drop what he was doing to drive 800 miles to help me move. We got a pleasant eveing out of it, at least.

Yesterday was spent driving back and taking naps. Now I have no excuse, I have to start assembling a syllabus and getting organized for genetics.

What a mess of a city

Yesterday, we traveled to Minneapolis. It was the day after a big snowstorm, and the only thing worse would be if we arrived a day earlier. Sidewalks haven’t been cleared, roads are covered with slush, and we tried walking around town. It wasn’t fun. Two foot tall piles of snow on the path made it more of a mountain climbing adventure.

One positive, though: I’m still suffering with this nasty deep-seated cold, erupting occasionally into hoarse coughing and snotty horrible sneezes. I found a cure! It’s only temporary, though, but it is good for a few hours relief. We went to an Indian restaurant and I ordered a vindaloo with a couple of volcanoes worth of hotness. It worked! My sinuses were thoroughly cleared out, I could breath unimpeded, and my throat was quivering in terror — if it coughed one more time, I was going to order another raund.

I am sorry to report, though, that around 2am the slime had oozed back and repopulated every cranial cavity. I may have to do it again.

I’m sorry, I may have gone too far

Ever since the Trump administration, I’ve been standing in my shrine, chanting “BLOOD AND SOULS FOR MY LORD ARIOCH,” and leaving a chalice of blood on the altar, all in hopes of summoning the chaos lords to my aid. I may have miscalculated. I did not expect my ritual to be so effective.

The Republican party has descended into shrieking madness, unable to accomplish even the most basic tasks of governing. On the positive side, that may mean they’re going to be unable to implement the specifics of their evil agenda, but on the debit side, they’re also blocking one of the houses of congress from governing at all.

I was thinking maybe I should back off a bit on the ritual incantations, but Arioch does not treat weakness kindly, and the backlash against me, personally, would be unthinkable. I must continue. I will accept the blame if the house of representatives bursts into green flames, Lauren Boebert is elected speaker, and giant tentacled beasts manifest in the Potomac. But you knew this is where the Republicans were going all along, right?

Student Evaluation of Teaching

For you non-academics unfamiliar with life at the university, yesterday was the day I got my evaluations. Yes, it’s true, the students get to turn everything around and grade the faculty on their performance. I can’t actually fail — tenure, you know — but these things do matter when it’s time to determine raises and that sort of thing (which will be roughly in mid-March). The department gets a tiny pot of money that the chair will dole out to the good little boys and girls, and she will use student evals as part of the determination, which also includes research and service.

So yesterday I cracked the virtual envelope to get the results, and they were fine. On a scale of 0 to 6, I got all 5s and 6s, which might translate into a raise of a few tens of dollars in a few months. It probably isn’t worth it, because I have to bust my ass for a year to get biology across to the students.

What’s more interesting is the comments students write, which I take far more seriously than numbers punched into a Likert scale, and are far more likely to get me to change things in the course. I got a few criticisms that made me happy.

Students said, “wasted too much time on creationism” and “I want to learn more biology, not creationism.” For context, I give ONE(1) lecture out of 30 that addresses religious objections to evolutionary theory. One. And this audience of smart millennials is just completely over it. That makes me so happy.

OK, have it your way. I’m cutting that lecture out of next year’s curriculum, and replacing it with more straight-up unvarnished biology, with no regrets. I hope this class is representative of their generation, because it’s about time we could ignore that nonsense.

Photoreceptor evolution

There was a fair amount of interest in my discussion of eye evolution last week, so let’s get a little more in-depth. This is a lecture on the level of what I tell my first year students in intro biology, so let’s see if I can put you to sleep, too.

Premieres at 2pm Central this afternoon. I’ll check in then to answer any questions, if any.

I’ve got a nasty cold, but I think my voice held up as well as could be expected — at least I held off the sneezing & coughing & vulgar snerks.

Pro-natalists, long-termists, the Church of the Future Police…what a nightmare

Malcolm & Simone Collins, a pair of grinning fascist gobshites

Look to the right. If you ever wanted to see a pair of gold-plated smirking morons, there they are. Those two, Malcolm and Simone Collins, were cooked in the crucible of weird Silicon Valley culture — he was a manager at Google, while she worked for Peter Thiel — and they came up with a techno-fetishist cult built on their misunderstanding of science. It’s a horror story.

Googleplex, the Google HQ in Mountain View, California, is an incubator for new religious movements. Ten years ago, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the Singularity. In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion of the Future Police, began by former Google manager Malcolm Collins and his wife Simone.

The Collinses came to my attention last month, thanks to a great article by Julia Black in Business Insider, called ‘Can Super Babies Save the World’. They’re the founders of pronatalist.org, and part of a pronatalist movement growing in Silicon Valley and around the world. Pronatalists think the world is facing a population crisis: not too many people, but too few. They think civilization is threatened because of lowering birth rates, ageing populations and plummeting male fertility (average sperm count fell 50% between 1973 and 2019, and no one is sure why).

OK, I might be persuaded that the carrying capacity of the planet might be somewhat greater than the current number of 7.9 billion, but only if there was a more equitable division of wealth — the rich are resource hogs — and if we made a concerted effort to develop more sustainable technologies. Somehow, I don’t think a pair of smug Silicon Valley smegholes would go along with that. I also think that all you have to do is examine the dismal prospects of climate change and environmental decline to see we can’t sustain the current population, so blithely suggesting we can just increase it more without consequences is insane.

Also, can I just say that naming your cult The Religion of Future Police sounds rather fascist?

These people are basically long-termists who are open about one of their goals. They aren’t just trying to expand humanity as a whole, they specifically want their own personal lineage to take over the world.

as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population. If they succeed, Malcolm continued, ‘we could set the future of our species’.

Their math is sort of right – 8 kids per child per generation for 11 generations is 8,589,934,592, or 8½ billion descendants. Imagine pressuring your children with the requirement that they must have at least 8 kids each! Unfortunately, they don’t carry through on the calculation. Since each generation after the first is only going to be half Collins (unless they’re also going to encourage incest), the individuals in that last generation are only going to be 0.0098% Collins, assuming there’s no interbreeding at all, which is unlikely given they’ll constitute a population of over 8 billion people. It’s a silly and innumerate endeavor. 99% of that 11th generation are going to be derived from genetic contributions from all the other people on Earth, and with any luck they’ll completely dilute out the taint of the Collins Family insanity.

They’re also open about trying to ‘improve’ the genetics of their children with crude engineering. Very crude. They don’t know what they’re doing at all.

They’re making children through IVF, which produces as many as a dozen fertilized eggs in a dish which can then be implanted back into Simone. A cell can be taken from each developing embryo and subjected to sequence analysis, and then they pore over the list of alleles and pick the very best super-baby combination. Or they think they do. We can’t do the kind of prediction of traits from raw genomic data that they are imagining.

Probably the most controversial part of their plan is their embrace of genetic enhancement for their children, something which they say is a secret pursuit among the tech rich. ‘We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,’ Malcolm said. They used a company called Genomic Prediction, started by physicist Steve Hsu, which offers polygenic risk scores on embryos. Julia Black writes:

Though Genomic Prediction’s “LifeView” test officially offers risk scores only for 11 polygenic disorders — including schizophrenia and five types of cancer — they allowed the Collinses to access the raw genetic data for their own analysis. Simone and Malcolm then took their data export to a company called SelfDecode, which typically runs tests on adult DNA samples, to analyze what the Collinses called “the fun stuff.”

Sitting on the couch, Simone pulled up a spreadsheet filled with red and green numbers. Each row represented one of their embryos from the sixth batch, and the columns a variety of relative risk factors, from obesity to heart disease to headaches. The Collinses’ top priority was one of the most disputed categories: what they called “mental-performance-adjacent traits,” including stress, chronically low mood, brain fog, mood swings, fatigue, anxiety, and ADHD. With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo №3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses’ third child.

Oh god, Stephen Hsu? they’re taking genetic advice from a racist physicist? All the traits they think they are selecting for are complex polygenic behavioral phenomena, products of currently uninterpretable combinatorial interactions. They think they’re being rational and logical by making choices based on numerical scores, but it’s all garbage in, garbage out.

Cocky little ignoramuses, aren’t they? Just the sort to base their life choices on a religion.

I wondered how they were paying for all this gee-whiz techno pseudo-science? Easy. They’re running a religious grift.

Today they live in a farmhouse in Philadelphia with three children and a fourth on the way. They’re launching a VC fund and accepting enrollments for The Collins Institute School for the Gifted, a $20,000-a-year course in homeschooling which teaches students math, coding, how to pitch, how to run successful email campaigns, and other life-skills. They’re also running a match-making service for alpha adults, and they’ve launched their own religion with an elaborate theology described in a GoogleDoc.

They’re selling a $20,000 course in homeschooling! You know, sending your kids to a public school is a better investment — they’ll get qualified teachers who are regularly assessed, and a curriculum set by state standards. I know, sometimes public schools can be awful for many kids, but it’s not because they lack a good framework. It’s because other people can be assholes.

A homeschool run by those two arrogant know-nothings, though, is guaranteed to have an enriched population of privileged assholes.

Their status as confirmed assholes can be determined by reading their Collins Family Theology document. It’s a turgid, pretentious mess that makes sweeping pronouncements about human nature, bolstered by a few citations to short science articles which I can tell you, he uses inappropriately. Malcolm Collins has a painfully linear and determinist view of genetics. For instance,

Our culture also resists instinctual attachment to biological identity, instead contextualizing children as more “us” than we—our present biological bundles—are. Consider that each biological kid you have is 50% you. As soon as you have more than three kids, there is more of your biological identity (1.5X) in them than there is in you.

By coincidence, I happen to have three kids. That does not mean 1.5 copies of me exist — each one is a unique combinations of genes and experience. You cannot quantify “biological identity” in that simple-minded way!

What they’re doing is building a relabeled version of eugenics, based on the same conceptual errors as the original eugenics. They’re making the same horrific categorizations that the Nazis did. If you don’t accept their views, then you’re a husk — something non-human.

They call their religion ‘secular Calvinism’ — interestingly, the scientist JBS Haldane called eugenics ‘scientific Calvinism’ in the 1920s. They believe the ultimate good in the universe is ‘sapience’. More humans = more sapience. More educated and more free-thinking humans = even more sapience. Intelligent, free-thinking humans are better, according to this theology, than conformist dull-witted herd-humans, or what the Collinses call ‘husks’:

we call them a “husk” because when someone halts the process of creative destruction — refusing to explore, weigh, and sometimes to accept new ideas — they stop being meaningfully human (in our House’s view, at least).

When eugenicists say that people who think differently to them are ‘husks’ who have ‘stopped being meaningfully human’, that’s a red flag folks!

To make it a little bit worse, their kids are taught to idolize the Future Police, an imagined population in the far distant future who are looking back and judging them for how well they assist their destiny in coming to be.

Future police as a family tradition are also very useful in conveying more complex concepts exemplifying our Secular Calvinist cultural framework (such as predestination, the future that must come to pass, and the Elect) in ways that a child can easily understand. For example, it is easy to explain to a kid why the Future Police have no motivation to protect an individual who lives only for themselves or their immediate community instead of the future of the species and their family. The concept of Future Police can be used to teach kids to constantly consider how their actions impact humanity in both the near and distant future.

Future Police also allow for fun family holiday traditions. For example, at the beginning of each year, our family has a celebration in which we combine common New Year’s traditions (such as making commitments to the future) with Future Police motifs, encouraging our kids to “prove their dedication to the future” to these distant descendents in order to curry their favor and secure gifts and privileges.

“Fun.” And then they all join in a rousing chorus of Tomorrow Belongs to Me. I call it terrifying children with threats of the Future Police judging them for failing to curry favor. This is just the same old fucked-up Christian guilt-trip.

Sure, Googleplex is an incubator for new religious movements, but they’re all loony as hell, all seem to converge on the same ol’ authoritarian cultishness, and I hope they all die and fade away.

Strategies for teaching math

Every year, I start teaching genetics by having the students do lots of math, and statistics, and probability calculations. It’s the most difficult part of the class for many of the students. But look! SMBC has a new pedagogical method!

If this works, it’ll revolutionize my classes. Hire a stripper to walk around lamenting that she doesn’t understand Poisson distributions or how to get a p value from that set of data, and presto, we’re done!

Except for one catch. I just checked my class list, and 71% of my students are young women, maybe some are lesbians, but that isn’t recorded in the class data.

Would it work if I traipsed around the classroom in a unitard?

Effective shunning

One of the bonuses of being on Mastodon is the fediverse is actually strong about crushing bad actors. A shiny new newspaper out of Yorkshire trying to make it in an online world published a lazy, stupid opinion piece about trans people — it’s England, you know, the place is infested with transphobes — and got slammed hard for it.

Yeah, they tried to play the game of saying it didn’t break any of their rules, just like Twitter was always doing — using vague rules to allow clear-cut hatred to get a pass.

That didn’t go over at all well. The Yorkshire lights went out all over Mastodon as instance after instance killed their feed. You want to see the horror settling into the admin of this for-profit newspaper as they realize they may have just destroyed their audience? Look here.

That’s usually a good sign that you done fucked up when Nazis start camping on your doorstep. I wish more media could grasp that simple, straightforward clue.

The House of Silence

The disease afflicting our house has now descended into the quiet hush phase. Our throats are sore, it hurts to talk; my wife waved good morning to me, we haven’t said a single word yet. It’s a bit eerie.

Don’t bother to visit, it’s like popping into a monastery where all the monks have taken vows of silence. You will get only gestures, and you will be turned away.