Waiting for my eyes to adapt to the darkness

I have changed my routine lately. I no longer read the news. There were a few blogs I read regularly, a couple of political YouTube channels I frequented, a podcast or two I’d listen to on walks. No more. I just can’t bear current events. I’m looking for distraction, and oh, what’s this? A movie review?

You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.

And I have noticed, from the first day to the 370th, that I can look at decapitated children now, held in the arms of parents maddened by grief and the tacit complicity of the United States and most of Europe, without looking away. I am a shell. I don’t sleep well anymore. I am hollowed-out and empty. I understand T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, his warning about the apocalypse, for the very first time. “Our dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass/In our dry cellar” and “Paralysed force, gesture without motion,” and “Remember us–if at all–not as lost/Violent souls, but only/As the hollow men/The stuffed men.” I understand who the “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” belong to now; I know where the “twilight kingdom” is, where the dead land “[u]nder the twinkle of a fading star” is, because I live there now. We live there together. The noise of us together sounds like the noise you make when you try not to make a noise. The dry rustle you hear is all our voices mouthing prayers to broken stones.

I understand Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp character, with his too-small hat and too-large shoes, the immigrant and eternal outsider who good-naturedly demonstrated the inhumanity of others through his interest in the weak and championing of the powerless. I understand why The Tramp appeared in the space between the mechanized mass slaughter and dismemberment of WWI and the rise of fascism and murder camps of WWII and fast became the most famous personality on the planet. Chaplin would play little tricks on despots and middle-managers, sly kicks and sleights-of-hand, and smile and wave if caught in the act. “You got me,” his grin says, which maybe has a dash of Bugs Bunny’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” as well. And I know why, at the end of his film The Great Dictator, Chaplin breaks character and the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly to plead with them to care again about the suffering of others. He spoke of a world rapidly tilting into totalitarianism: the best filled with despair and the worst locating that seam in the sheer rockface of our sense of righteous morality that allows them to find purchase, take root, spore. He begged us to remember who we were when we could still weep, when we had to look away.

How long has it been for you? How far has it progressed? I know. I’m sorry.

That’s from a review of Terrifier 3. I’d seen a bit of the first Terrifier movie, didn’t like at all, and didn’t even know they were already making sequels of the thing, but of course they are. Maybe if I gazed into the abyss a little harder, I’d be desensitized enough to witness more of the fascist state of America, but I’m not. If anything, I’ve become hypersensitized. I find refuge in science and work and my day-to-day routine, I’m afraid to look up and see the catastrophe coming.

That article gives me hope — more than hope, a sense that it is inevitable that someday my privilege will be bled away, that I will stop caring and can look on the horror without feeling battered and eviscerated, because my heart will have been burned out and meaning will have been murdered. Join me in the twilight kingdom, where the darkness waits for us all.

Isn’t that a happy thought? Don’t you want to chitter and murmur and rustle in the decaying attic of our dreams, together?

Coincidentally…

In that treasure trove of old documents from my mother, I found this little surprise: she’d also saved one of my extra figures from my research at the University of Oregon, the stuff that led to me working with Judith Eisen.

Photograph of horseradish peroxidase labeled spinal motoneurons

That’s another oldie — Mom must have asked what the heck I was doing in the lab, and I gave her an old print and tried to explain it to her. And she salted it away for 40 years!

“a VEWY fwightened widdew man”

A liberal feminist, Marla Rose, knocked on Nick Fuentes’ door. He reacted by immediately pepper-spraying her, knocking her down, and and stealing her phone. All she did was knock!

In a Facebook post, Rose elaborated on her motivations, citing Fuentes’ controversial reputation. “What would you do if a neo-Naz*, white supremacist who called on a holy war against J*ws and is a loud, proud misogynist lives in your town?” she wrote. Encouraged by a friend, Rose explained, “So I rang the doorbell, he immediately swung the door open like he was at damn Waco, sprayed me with a burning liquid…and pushed me down the stairs onto his sidewalk.”

Rose noted that a passerby called the police, after which EMTs checked her for injuries. “The nice EMTs took my vitals in the ambulance,” she added, sharing, “I am a little sore on my right side, where I fell, but I’m fine.” She also described the police response as dismissive, allegedly asking, “‘For what?’ I said, dumbfounded, ‘For ASSAULT.’ And he was like, ‘Well, you went to his door.’”

Public reactions have been polarized. While some supporters see Rose’s actions as justified given Fuentes’ past incitements on social media, critics argue that her approach and alleged doxxing crossed legal and ethical boundaries. Some have called for legal repercussions against Rose.

That’s exactly what I’d expect of the police.

I’m interested in these “legal repercussions.” Would they apply if a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness knocked on my door, too? The next little kid going door-to-door selling girl scout cookies better watch out, I’ve got the Nick Fuentes precedent saying I can beat her up and steal a box, and if she complains, I’ll have her arrested.

You can tell, though, that Nick Fuentes is terrified. All the fascists must know that the actions they take while in power will have…repercussions.

One of my role models, recognized

My experiences in grad school were mostly happy ones, and I credit that to the fact that I was lucky to work with good people. I entered the lab of Charles Kimmel, working on zebrafish neuroscience, and stumbled my way through several projects before Chuck suggested a new one: he recommended that I use a fluorescent lineage tracer dye, rhodamine dextran, injected into midblastula cells, which we’d allow to develop into a larva in the hopes that some of that dye would end up in the neurons I was interested in.

This was a cunning strategem. First of all, this was a labor-intensive project; we’d have to do a hell of a lot of injections to get the dye into the few cells we cared about by happenstance. We’d eventually do the experiment and get a yield somewhere under 5%. The other angle is that he already had someone lined up to work on the idea, and I was being drafted to assist in the experiment.

I didn’t mind. That someone was a new post-doc, Judith Eisen, and I think we worked well together. Judith was intimidatingly intense, but nice. We got into the rhythm of this experiment smoothly. In the evening (this was a timing-dependent experiment, you had to start with embryos of a certain age) we’d get together over a beaker with hundreds of embryos, and then we had to work fast, because there was a narrow window of time to get the injections done. I’d line up ten or so embryos on a slide, and pass them to Judith, who was poised over the microscope with a microinjector, and bang bang bang, she’d shoot up single cells with the dye. I was the loader, she was the gunner. We’d set up maybe a hundred embryos before stopping and letting them then develop.

The fun work started the next day. We’d go through the previous night’s collection, put each embryo under a fluorescence microscope with a silicon intensified target camera and take pictures. Most of them we’d throw out — they had labeled skin cells, or labeled kidney, or labeled notochord, or whatever, which might be useful to someone, but not us. We wanted labeled spinal neurons. We’d get a few.

The next step might sound crude, but it was the 1980s, it was what we could do. We’d see a glowing cell on the video monitor, and we’d tape a piece of transparent plastic on the screen and outline all the cells with a sharpie. Then we’d come back to that special cell over the course of the day, and draw on that same piece of plastic with a different color. Our data was these sheets with the changing shape of labeled cells.

I vividly remember our eureka moment. We were going through our daily labeled embryos, and we had this one fish that looked familiar, a cell that looked like one we’d seen before. We sat there and made a prediction, I bet we knew exactly how that cell would develop in the next few hours. Judith grabbed all our data and spent an afternoon manually aligning all these drawings — our simple technique had some virtues, in that we could so easily align analog pictures — and came back and could say that we had precisely three cell types that had a stereotyped pattern of outgrowth.

Those were great times, and it was most excellent working with Judith. Some of my happiest memories of working in science were from those years in Chuck’s lab, partnering with Judith, so the latest news from Oregon makes me even happier: Judith Eisen has been elevated to the National Academy of Sciences! That is a well-deserved honor, and I’m happy for her.

What I learned from that experience was that a key ingredient of good research was collegiality, mutual support, and cooperativity. I think that’s what I took away from my training, that I should model my own mentorship in the years since on that of Judith Eisen and Chuck Kimmel.

Mothers have a sneaky way of getting to you

The last time I was in Washington, we had cleaned out a lot of my parent’s old stuff, and I was leaving after having booked a real estate agent to sell off the property. There were boxes and bags of miscellaneous papers that were going to be thrown out or destroyed, and I scooped up a luggage bag full of it without looking closely at it — I just didn’t want to abandon some piece of family history. I haven’t dug into it yet, but I had a moment free and plucked out a few random bits to see what treasures I had rescued.

Here are my parents, sometime in the late 1980s/early 90s.

Here’s Mom’s 5th grade report card (my grandmother also saved everything.)

That’s pretty good, young lady, but we’re going to have to have a little talk about that C in writing. Also, what’s the difference between writing and English?

I didn’t get any further in sorting through the collection because then I discovered she had saved all the mother’s day cards we had sent to her. Aww, Mom. You cared? Now I feel bad for not sending one this year. I am a terrible son.

Science needs specific, informed, productive criticism

Professor Dave demolishes Sabine Hossenfelder.

I feel that. The topic of my history class last week and this week is about bias in late 19th/early 20th century evolutionary biology, and how we have to be critical and responsible in our assessment of scientific claims. It’s tough, because I’m strongly pro-science (obviously, I hope?) but I keep talking about dead ends and errors in the growth of a scientific field, and I have to take some time to reassure the students that our only hope to correct these kinds of problems is…science. I also have to explain that the way the errors are discovered is…science, again.

I’m not specifically interested in Sabine Hossenfelder — I don’t watch her videos, not even the ones that might contain good information — but I am concerned with the general problem of how anti-science propaganda manages to advance the causes of dogma. If science gets something wrong, as it does sometimes, it does not mean that superstition or bigotry are right. Raging against the whole of the scientific establishment and the scientific method is how you get RFK Jr put in charge of the NIH. I don’t think that even Hossenfelder believes that will be an improvement.

Can we demand an ethical standard for government?

A common sense act has been introduced in congress, HR 926, asking for basic ethical requirements for the Supreme Court. It sounds like something that ought to be in place.

This bill makes various changes related to the ethical standards, financial disclosure requirements, and recusal requirements that apply to Supreme Court Justices.

Among the changes, the bill requires the Supreme Court to:

adopt a code of conduct for Justices and establish procedures to receive and investigate complaints of judicial misconduct;

adopt rules governing the disclosure of gifts, travel, and income received by the Justices and law clerks that are at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules; and

establish procedural rules requiring each party or amicus to disclose any gift, income, or reimbursement provided to Justices.

Additionally, the bill expands the circumstances under which a Justice or judge must be disqualified; and

requires the Supreme Court and the Judicial Conference to establish procedural rules for prohibiting the filing of or striking an amicus brief that would result in the disqualification of a Justice, judge, or magistrate judge.

That’s excellent, and there’s a push to get everyone to call up your state representative to support this bill.

I agree with the bill, BUT…

I have no hope.

The fascists take over the government in January, and they’ll kill this bill. They already have. It was introduced in February of 2023, and it’s gone nowhere. Are we supposed to expect a miracle in the next two months?

I have another problem. If you actually go to the site promoted in that image, the first thing you will see is a plea for donations. It’s all about money. They also ask for your phone number, which I’ll never give out again. I made a donation to the Harris campaign months ago, and they passed my number to other organizations, so I was getting dozens of text messages every goddamned day. They all had a stop code you could send to end the noise, but I discovered that they honored it in name only. The organization I requested to stop would stop, but then they’d pass my number to a different, related organization, and the texts would continue. “Retired Democrats 2024”? “Blue Battleground Project”? “GenBlue PAC”? I didn’t sign up for any of those, and somehow they got my number. I don’t trust Democratic fundraisers.

Maybe we should start by demanding an ethical standard for all political organizations?

I know this is a mixed message. I think putting an ethical standard on the Supreme Court is important, but the Democrats are proving themselves venal and ineffectual.

You have to admire their cunning

Every year, around this time, as the weather gets colder, we get an influx of mice moving into our house to find refuge. Our cat is useless — she makes a lot of noise, usually in the middle of the night, but she can never deliver the coup de grace.

It seems I already have a potential solution at hand.

Warning: the videos below show mice meeting a horrible end in the webs of black widows.

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