The AIs and the plants have formed an alliance!

Face it, we’re doomed.

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

Those are some pretty aggressive machete moves, I notice.

Sad news

Passing along the obituary for my brother Jim.

James “Jim” Myers passed away at his home in Hoquiam September 23, 2022 surrounded by his children after battling Cancer for the last two years. Jim was born June 22, 1958 in Kent, Washington to James C. Myers, Sr. and Darlene (Westad) Myers. Jim graduated from Kent Meridian High School in 1976. After a brief enlistment in the Army, Jim married Karen (Church) Myers in 1978 in South Bend, Washington. The two lived and raised their children in the Willapa Harbor area most of the 27 years that they were married. Jim stood by Karen’s side and cared for her until she lost her battle with cancer in 2004. In May of 2008 Jim married Julie (Bjornsson) Myers in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Jim always told people that he was a lucky man because he not only found love with a wonderful woman once, but he was able to find it twice. Jim and Julie moved from Tacoma to Hoquiam in 2015 and happily lived together on their property until Julie passed away after a brief illness in 2021.

Jim worked fourteen years as a commercial fisherman before going to work for the Westport Shipyard for more than ten years. Jim also worked many years with Federal Marine & Defense Services, Quinault Beach Resort and Casino, and until having to take an early retirement due to his illness, he worked for The Grays Harbor Transit. Jim was well known for being a hard worker as well as having a quick wit and sarcastic humor. Jim was very stoic with his feelings but showed his love through kind hearted teasing. Jim enjoyed watching and collecting movies, the quirkier the better. Jim also was an avid reader who enjoyed reading about history and anything nautical. Jim had a deep interest in tractors and enjoyed using his tractors on his property, especially with his grandson. He was a talented artist who enjoyed drawing and painting. Jim also appreciated music and not only enjoyed listening to a wide variety of music, he was self-taught on the guitar and ukulele. In his spare time Jim enjoyed traveling, especially to Las Vegas and Zihuantanejo, Mexico. Jim loved to play in Poker and Black Jack tournaments and also teaching people how to play cards. Most of all Jim just loved being at home with his family.

Jim was preceded in death by his father, James C. Myers Sr; his wives, Karen (Church) Myers and Julie (Bjornsson) Myers; His son, Benjamin James Myers and his sister, Lisa (Myers) Clendening. Jim is survived by his mother, Darlene (Westad) Myers of Auburn, WA as well as his siblings Paul (Mary) Myers of Morris, MN, Caryn Clendening of Auburn, WA, Tomi Myers- Pierce of Kent, WA, and Michael (Wendy) Myers of Auburn, WA. Jim also leaves behind his children, Rachael (Ken) Hahn of McCleary, WA, Charles (Amelia) Myers of Bellingham, WA, Evan Myers of Hoquiam. Jim is also survived by his grandson, Alex Hahn of McCleary, numerous nieces and nephews as well as his “favorite child” his Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Nestle.

An informal Celebration of life for Jim is planned for October 15, 2022 at 1pm at the Hoquiam Grand Central Event Center, 427 7 th St. Hoquiam, WA 98550. In lieu of flowers, family asks that donations be made in Jim’s name to the North Beach Medical Equipment, PO BOX 2363, Ocean Shores, WA 98569.

I’ll be making a weekend trip to the West coast in a week and a half. I wish I had a better reason for it.

It isn’t hypocrisy at all

And it probably won’t cost him any votes. It has been discovered that Herschel Walker paid for a girlfriend to get an abortion, in spite of the fact that, on the campaign trail, he has been loudly opposed to abortion for any reason.

A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.

She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.

The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.

Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.

The woman said Walker, who was not married at the time, told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. It was a feeling she shared, but what she didn’t know was that Walker had an out-of-wedlock child with another woman earlier that same year.

This won’t even cause a hiccup in his campaign. The thing to realize is that anti-abortion advocates aren’t actually so much anti-abortion as they are anti-women’s autonomy. This abortion was OK because a man blessed it. What would get them outraged is if a woman aborted a man’s unborn child without his permission. Permission granted by a man? Stomp that fetus!

His potential Republican colleagues are probably ready to high-five him and call him a moral exemplar. Even his record of domestic violence doesn’t trouble the Republican base, because that’s simply a man exhibiting his dominion over his wife. Perfectly fine.

Like tiny little cats

We have a pet bold jumper in a terrarium in our kitchen, and it’s true — they are pleasant little animals, highly interactive, and not at all threatening.

Our bold jumper might be flattered by this video, except for the bit where he talks about the spider’s tiny little brain. I disagree, they’re very smart!

Jonathan Haidt goes full Jordan Peterson

Haidt seems to have realized how profitable outrage can be

Never go full Peterson. Unless, that is, you want to tap into the usual conservative grift.

So Haidt has announced that he’s quitting his professional society because they expect a statement about how their work contributes to the greater community. This is a great affront, especially since asking a super-privileged white guy to address issues of equity, inclusion, diversity, and anti-racism is profoundly offensive, I guess.

Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.

“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.” [I’m sorry, that pegged my meter measuring pretentious pomposity in academic jargon]

“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”

Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.”

This is absurd faux outrage, worthy of a Jordan Peterson. How can you get this upset at a request to justify the social consequences of your research? Is there something wrong with NYU that you can have a long career there and never have to explain how your work fits into the greater “telos” of the institution? Because it’s not simply “truth”, it’s deeper and more complex than that. Universities play a role in society, and it’s not to simply spit out abstract facts. To deny that is to deny a truth.

Also, it wasn’t a litmus test of any kind. The society is not requiring that you meet any diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements to submit an abstract; you’re asked whether your work advances their anti-racism goals. You could say “it doesn’t”, and your work will still be assessed on other criteria. I suspect this new statement is part of an intelligence-gathering effort, to see whether the society as a whole is making contributions to address the problem of racism. From that perspective, maybe Haidt dropping out is going to improve their metrics.

So I took a look at the onerous demands of SPSP. Here they are; they request a short statement to accompany abstracts submitted to their professional meeting.

  • Equity & Anti-racism:
    Evaluate the extent to which the submission advances SPSP’s goal of promoting equity, inclusion and anti-racism. To do so, please consider the equity statement as well as the submission as a whole. Submissions advancing equity, inclusion, and anti-racist goals may include (but are not limited to):

    • Diverse research participants (e.g., understudied or underserved populations)
    • Diverse research methods (e.g., methodology that promotes equity or engages underserved communities or scholars).
    • Diverse members of the research team (e.g., those from underrepresented sociodemographic backgrounds, from an array of career stages, from outside the United States, or with professional affiliations that are not typical at SPSP such as predominately undergraduate serving institutions, minority-serving institutions, or outside academia)
    • Presentation content (e.g., prejudice and discrimination, critical theories, cross-cultural research).

So? How could anyone find that difficult, or contravening the truth, to answer that honestly? That’s routine stuff. Any socially conscious institution could help you address those points with very little effort.

I made that point on Twitter myself.

I got so many responses from people who simply can’t imagine how I would address the social relevance of spider research, like it’s impossible that a biological subject could possibly have any influence on the human world. I think these bozos have a real problem. The SPSP has provided a list to tell you exactly how to answer their concerns.

  • Diverse research participants: my first project was to assess spider populations in the Stevens County community. I specifically sought out sites in a variety of residences, putting out a call in the local newspaper to get volunteers.
  • Diverse research methods: this one is a little tougher for me (fortunately, I don’t have to tick all the boxes) because it was a brief preliminary project without a lot of different approaches. But I could say it involved both field and lab work, and participants were given the choice in how they wanted to work.
  • Diverse members of the research team: ultra easy. I’m at a university that is committed to supporting diverse populations in the region. My student research teams have had native American and non-binary students and men and women actively involved in the work.
  • Presentation content: Another tough one, but not impossible. I’ve done presentations on the importance of spiders to the ecology of our communities to senior citizens and student groups. I can’t honestly say I’ve done work on prejudice or discrimination (although people definitely discriminate against spiders, I don’t think that’s what they mean), but there on my long list of potential projects is a survey of attitudes and spider populations on local reservations, compared to those in town.

I’d probably get my work rejected by the SPSP because it’s way outside the field of psychology, but not because I’m unaware of wider consequences. What blows my mind is that Haidt is a psychologist, studying “moral foundations”, and he blows a gasket because he can’t be bothered to explain, briefly, what this has to do with anti-racism, or diversity, or equity? What’s going on here? Does he only study the attitudes of wealthy white college students, or does he only bring white students into his research lab, and does he refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures in his work? I don’t believe any of that could be true (and if it were, it would call into question the validity of all of his research), and it ought to be trivial for him to check off the criteria for presenting at the meeting. At the very least, NYU has to have a diverse student body.

Instead, he chooses to posture and protest and complain. That will endear him to racists and knee-jerk freezepeachers, but it’s not going to cut it with the majority of his peers, who are, I’m sure, seeing this requirement not as a hurdle but an opportunity to make the broader significance of their research more explicit.

The Freedom from Atheism Foundation is wrong about everything

If you’re at all interested in how religion wrecks people’s brains, take a look at the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (also on Facebook, where it’s updated more frequently. All the worst shit is on Facebook.) I thought the cartoon on the right was typical, because the little kid’s reply in no way addresses the point Cartoon Dawkins was making, but apparently they think it’s cogent.

It turns out they’ve been claiming that I support them, which is weird. That claim was noted on RationalWiki.

This webshite website is so biased and full of hate that many would consider it to be a “hate group”, as it frequently uses lies, generalizations, and intentional misrepresentations to defame atheists — but then of course, if they do all of that, then they are totally not a hate group, you intolerant, militant atheist. In fact, the FFAF even claims to “love” the very people whom they work so hard to dehumanize. In a brilliant display of deliberate dishonesty, the Freedom From Atheism Foundation also falsely claimed that they were “endorsed” by PZ Myers, despite the fact that he openly stated in his blogpost that he does not at all agree with them, criticizes their claim that “atheism is a religion”, and states that their goal is “all about restricting religious freedom.”

Never be ironic in titling your posts about them, because they won’t get it…or will deliberately misrepresent it.

Conservapædia doesn’t get it, either.

Atheist activist PZ Myers issued a statement on May 9, 2014 called “I support the Freedom From Atheism Foundation”. In this statement, Myers stated “I am happy to agree that atheism should be kept out of the public square, if religion is also excluded. There’s this principle called secularism that I think is a good idea, and the only way to accommodate a religiously diverse community.”

I hope the title of this post clarifies everything for those little minds.

Grim business

It looks like the Ukrainians are currently winning, although who knows what will happen when the Russians throw 300,000 conscripts into the meat grinder. What I’m getting out of the news, though, is how bloody and brutal the war is in reality. It’s not shifting lines on a map, it’s dead people. Every gain costs lives.

The Ukrainian soldiers waved, hooted and raised their fists in triumph as they drove out of the strategic eastern city of Lyman on Monday, riding M113 armored personnel vehicles provided by Western countries. They passed eight corpses of enemy Russian soldiers who died trying to run from a Ukrainian counteroffensive that swept through the area and is still going, putting the lie to President Vladimir Putin’s annexation claims.

What I find shocking in that Washington Post story is that it goes on to describe the bloated corpses. I did not expect that. I guess there’s a fine line to be drawn here — you don’t want to sanitize a violent war.

Along the same lines, here’s a blog that consists of transcribed text messages from a volunteer fighting in Ukraine. The volunteer is an American veteran who went off to war (my thought: what the heck is wrong with him? Going to fight, just because fighting is what he does.) It’s all about making people dead.

This has got to end sometime, but I don’t see an end in sight.

He’s getting desperate

Trump just forwarded a prayer to his followers on Trump Social. I think he’s broken and desperate.

I think that if there were a god, such a being would see right through Trump’s chicanery and know that he’s far more creepily secular than his opponents, and would immediately strike dead with a lightning bolt any MAGAt who had the affrontery to make that prayer.

Are those red hat fools still milling around out there? There is no god. QED.

Cheaters!

Walleye fishing is a big deal here in the upper midwest, and fishermen may be known to exaggerate the size of their catch somewhat, but this is going too far. In a fishing competition, one team did more than just talk up their catch, they committed abuse of an animal corpse to pad their numbers.

The competition in Cleveland was supposed to last two days but was cut down to just Friday because of bad weather. Fishermen in roughly 65 two-man teams started the day in a specific location on Lake Erie and had eight hours to catch the biggest set of five fish.

That was going to be Runyan and Cominsky, until Fischer pulled 10 weights totaling seven pounds out of their entry, the tournament director said. Plus, Fischer added, he found filets from other fish that had been stuffed down the walleyes’ throats to beef them up. Unlike weights, filets escape the notice of metal detectors.

“It was just simply walleye filets inside of a walleye,” he said.

Wow. That’s just blatant. Those two guys are going to be so intensely ostracized in the fishing community, and they’re never going to be trusted again, that they ought to just hang their heads in shame, throw their gear in the trash, and never set foot in a boat again. If you think cancel culture is harsh on the internet, getting caught lying to such an extreme is going to utterly ruin these guys’ hobby.

Chase Cominsky, left, and Jacob Runyan, right

Wait, those guys’ coats are splattered with commercial logos? Did they have pro sponsorships? Kiss those goodbye, too.

The gods themselves oppose the bosses

We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.

From the 1970s, huh? At a time when I would sometimes read comic books to my staunchly pro-union father. No wonder I got no pushback from my parents when I was avidly reading that trashy stuff — it was fundamentally righteous.