I’ve got a lot of work to do today, and the neighbors across the street have fired up some absurdly loud compressor for some home improvement project. Absurdly? INTOLERABLY. I’m gone. My wife and I are leaving, and I hope this monstrous noise won’t be going on all day.
Stop smiling already.
Uh-oh. As I get older, I’d like to think science will come up with treatments for cognitive decline (don’t worry, I’m not showing any symptoms…yet. I don’t think. How would I know?), and Alzheimer’s is serious problem. Judging by the fact that we always get a couple of seminars on Alzheimer’s from our graduating seniors, it’s of concern to even young people. Unfortunately, every prospective drug against the disease seems to flop in clinical trials. It’s entirely possible that 16 years of research has been misled by one study that identified a candidate amyloid protein as the causal agent.
The first author of that influential study, published in Nature in 2006, was an ascending neuroscientist: Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota (UMN), Twin Cities. His work underpins a key element of the dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which holds that Aβ clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness, which afflicts tens of millions globally. In what looked like a smoking gun for the theory and a lead to possible therapies, Lesné and his colleagues discovered an Aβ subtype and seemed to prove it caused dementia in rats.
Why did it have to be the University of Minnesota?
That initial paper that set the field charging off in a specific direction seems to have been fraudulent.
A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”
Lesné has gone silent. The university is investigating. Lawyers are, I’m sure, standing by with bated breath.
The evidence is built around Western blots, which are used to resolve individual proteins from a sample. A bunch of the published (and some of the unpublished) data show unmistakeable, unambiguous evidence of tampering, and someone in that lab was clearly going into the data and patching it up to look more convincing. Human eyes aren’t very good at detecting slight variations in a semi-random smear of pixels, but computers excel at it, and the evidence of copy/pasting and merging jump out at you.
Why does anyone pull this kind of crap with their data? If the raw data doesn’t show it, if it can’t be extracted with a statistical analysis of the original image, it doesn’t exist. You can’t compensate for a negative result by artificially pasting the result you wanted in place.
This is a catastrophe. One ambitious researcher faked data in order to get a paper in Nature, and now it’s a quarter billion dollar industry built on a false foundation.
The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.
The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”
Great. Forgery and confirmation bias make a terrific pairing.
The latest gender critical outrage: the Women’s March logo has 3 profiles, and one of them doesn’t look feminine enough. It must be a man, baby!
"We're here to protect women! Unless they don't have the nose shape we like. Or they have broad shoulders. Or anything else we don't deem feminine enough"
I keep saying GCs are doing nothing but reinforce gender stereotypes that harm women https://t.co/rQqMH4kCaX— Emma (@EmmaTheGoblin) July 23, 2022
There are no women on planet Earth who have a face anything like the one on that alien creature on the left! As we all know, you can reliably determine the sex of an individual from the shape of their nose. Or something. It’s biology, man.
Oh, here’s a fun game! I found a page of cameo portraits of Victorian ladies, with lots of photos of Victorian…uh, women. I’m not sure anymore. According to the GCs, the British empire must have been built by brave men who kept a trans woman at home, since there are a lot of deviations from the dainty feminine ideal there.
They’re all quite lovely — these were intended to be flattering portraits of their subjects — but I’m sure the GCs could pull out their calipers and determine that the majority were men in wigs.
Also, biology would tell you that not only is there a tremendous amount of variation in human facial features, but human perception is finely tuned to recognize those variations.
Today is my dull working day.
First up: I gotta go walk a kilometer or two. I’m not in physical therapy now, but I do have to keep up with some exercise.
Secondly, it’s a spider feeding day, and sheesh, but I have a lot of baby spiders who want their living, crawling meat.
Thirdly, I’ve got my Skepticon talk all outlined up in Keynote, with some of the images. Now I have to flesh everything out. The goal is to have it all done this weekend. Gone are the days when I would check into a hotel the night before and hack out the whole talk!
Is this my summer break? Could be worse, I guess.
Lady Gaga is on tour, starting in Europe…and as expected, the show features fabulous costumes and choreography.
Awesome. An arachnid’s dream.
I was so tempted that I even looked up her tour venues, and fortunately, for anyone who shouldn’t go out into crowds indoors (like everyone), Minneapolis isn’t on the list. I guess I won’t put myself at risk!
OK, this is creepy. Just the other day I posted about the Morris police being disbanded, and now this video comes out.
One particularly good point he made: who is our sheriff? I didn’t know! So I looked him up. It’s Jason Dingman. I don’t know if he’s a good guy, I don’t know whether I voted for him or not, but for sure I’ll scrutinize the candidate(s) in the next election.
Now Cody: get the camera or keylogger out of my office.
I hope all the gun-fondlers have tissues at hand, because they’re probably going to need some cleanup. The rest of us are going to need puke buckets.
Recently, Sig Sauer won a huge military contract to provide the next generation of squad weapons. These will be the replacements for the existing M4 and SAW. They will be better at punching holes in people! I guess that’s what you want for the military.
The SIG-LMG lightweight belt-fed machine gun and SIG MCX-SPEAR Rifle are purpose-built to harness the energy of the SIG FURY 6.8 Common Cartridge Ammunition enabling greater range and increased lethality while reducing the soldier’s load on the battlefield. Both the SIG-LMG and MCX-SPEAR deliver significant weapon and technology advancements to the soldier and provide a solution for battlefield overmatch in comparison to the current M249 and M4/M4A1.
FOR THE FUCKING MILITARY. Sig Sauer, evil hell-sucking demon corporation that it is, is not satisfied with the billions they’ll get from the army, so they have also announced a civilian version of the weapon. Because we need it, apparently.
“This is a weapon that could defeat any body armor, any planned body armor that we know of in the future,” then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told the Army Times in 2019. “This is a weapon that can go out at ranges that are unknown today.”
…
“It’ll shoot through almost all of the bulletproof vests that are worn by law enforcement in the country right now,” said Ryan Busse, a former firearms company executive who is now a senior policy analyst with the Giffords Law Center and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America.
I am no fan of the cops, but I don’t think selling a cop-killer is a good idea. I also don’t want to imagine what this thing could do to small children. I suspect it won’t be long until we find out.
The only saving grace here is that the thing costs $8,000. That will not deter any of the fanatics, unfortunately. Of anyone planning to buy one, I have to ask…what the fuck is wrong with you, sicko?
We’re not done with news from the hellscape, though.
All the people who laughed off the “worrywarts” years ago for freaking out about the Funny Dancing Robot Dogs ™ should be forced to watch this video once a day for the remainder of the year. pic.twitter.com/WBIrlGah3w
— Sean Chiplock (@sonicmega) July 20, 2022
Somebody suggest to one of the reality TV shows that moving a team of MAGA-hat-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving yahoos who have bought an MCX-SPEAR into some desolate wasteland somewhere where they have to fight Funny Dancing Robot Dogs to the death. I wouldn’t watch it, and I wouldn’t want to guess who’d win, but I’d be hoping for mutual extermination.
Do not make your observatory look like a giant pill bug.
If poor weather wasn't bad enough, it looks like our La Palma observatory is under threat from enormous arachnoids. The great beast was seen dimly through the clouds earlier in the week. This creature must be 5m long! Observers should not approach – hostile intent must be assumed pic.twitter.com/r1AcdfWEsB
— GOTO Observatory (@GOTOObservatory) September 25, 2020
That’s how you get giant spiders, you know.
Yesterday, there was a brief paroxysm of optimism in the press. A law codifying same-sex marriage passed the House!
Nearly 50 House Republicans voted to write same-sex marriage into law Tuesday, joining all Democrats in a heavily bipartisan vote that would’ve been considered unthinkable a decade ago.
Democrats loudly cheered from their side of the chamber as the bill passed 267-157, with 47 Republicans backing it, including members of GOP leadership such as Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and National Republican Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.). Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) voted no.
47 Republicans in favor of marriage equality? That’s nice, but I can do math. 157 Republicans voted against it, and 157 is greater than 47 by a lot. I can also do a little psychology, and I wonder how many of the pro votes were from politicians putting on a show while trusting that the Senate would block it?
Amanda Marcotte thinks the same way I do, and she put the correct interpretation of this vote.
In response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, the Democrat-controlled House has teed up twin bills, one to protect same-sex marriage and one to protect the right to contraception, out of concern that the conservative majority is coming for those rights next. It’s a totally justified fear. In his concurrence on the Roe overturn, Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called previous decisions to legalize contraception and same-sex marriage “demonstrably erroneous” and called on the court to “correct” those rights like they “corrected” the right to abortion.
These two bills are almost certainly doomed to fail, because the Republican minority in Congress has a near-absolute power to kill bills through the abusing the filibuster. That’s what happened when House Democrats tried to protect abortion rights. There’s little reason to think Republicans have any more affection for the right to prevent pregnancy or allowing LGBTQ people to marry for love.
Tuesday, this was proved when a whopping 78% of Republicans in the House failed to vote for marriage equality. While the bill passed due to a Democratic majority, it’s near-certain that Republicans in the Senate will filibuster any attempt to protect same-sex marriage. And yet, if you glanced through mainstream media headlines, you’d think that Republicans have wrapped themselves in the rainbow flag and are celebrating same-sex marriage these days.
…
“47 House Republicans vote to write same-sex marriage into law,” Politico declared, failing both to give the 100% of Democrats who voted for it credit and ignoring the 78% of Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage rights.
The CBS headline highlighted the 47 Republicans who voted for the bill over the 164 who voted no or refused to show up. Even the BBC, which is usually better than this, played along with “Republicans help pass House gay marriage bill.”
That is correct. Those 47 Republicans are merely the lice-ridden, reeking merkin covering the repulsive pubes of the degenerate puritans of the Republican party. Don’t be fooled as Politico was. (Knowing Politico, they’re probably a willing part of the wig, anyway.) Repealing legalized same-sex marriage is part of the official Republican party platform!
The usual suspects are also loudly belittling the bill while also planning to repeal same-sex marriage and outlaw contraception.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene threw a tantrum declaring that the bill was unnecessary because “no one is taking away gay marriage.” She then admitted that she was voting against it because “I believe that marriage is a union made by God between a man and a woman.” Rep. Jim Jordon of Ohio thundered that Democrats are trying to “attempt to intimidate the United States Supreme Court,” a talking point that only makes sense if the plan is to have the court overturn same-sex marriage against the will of the people. (And only if you believe the Supreme Court’s “right” to vacate all laws Republicans don’t like is absolute.) Sen. Marco Rubio, who is up for re-election in Florida this year, said he would vote against the House bill to protect same-sex marriages, calling it a “stupid waste of time.”
No doubt about it: Same-sex marriage is popular with the public. Then again, so are abortion rights. The opposition to same-sex marriage comes from the exact same minority of people — call them Christian nationalists — who oppose abortion rights. The GOP answers to this small minority and not to the larger public. That’s why they are dismantling democracy so that the more liberal majority simply doesn’t have a say in what our laws around marriage and reproductive rights are. And, just as with the attack on abortion rights, Republicans know they have to use deflection and subterfuge to advance their agenda so that they can snatch the right to same-sex marriage away without most of the public realizing that it’s happening until it’s too late.
Those same Republicans said there was no way Roe v. Wade was on the table for repeal, and then, thwip, it was suddenly gone and they were rejoicing. Look for the same magic trick to be pulled on all of our rights.
I got an offer this morning to host a 30 second commercial on my next video — and they’d pay me $1800 for it. Whoa, is a little spot on a video by a little-known YouTuber like myself worth that much? No, it is not, but the money would be nice, and I delude myself into thinking I at least contribute a little knowledge on those things. A niggling temptation wormed its way into my brain.
I was briefly entertaining the idea enough to look up the company making the offer.
It’s one of those crypto/NFT scammer companies.
Well, that made it easy: HELL NO.
At least I was reminded I should get off my butt and implement a couple of the video ideas I have in my head. It’s just that right now I have so many spiders and so many egg sacs that demand my attention and I have to get this developmental timing series done before summer ends and I’m suddenly teaching 3 classes again…
