Thanks I hate it

There was a time when I could walk into a classroom, plug my laptop into a cable to the video projector, and run my Keynote/Powerpoint presentation with a minimum of fuss. No more.

Since I have classes in two days, I went into my classroom to test out all the technology. The old ways no longer work. Instead, I have to log in to the classroom projector and tell it which input to use. Then I have to log in to zoom twice, once to get on my university account, then again to link up to zoom. Then I have to use an iPad at the front of the room to inform it to let zoom know I’m doing a lecture. I fire up my presentation software, tell zoom which window I’m using, and then I’m off! No, not quite. When I start, I have to click on a button on the iPad to let it know to start recording, at which time it asks for my email address.

Then, finally, I can turn to the students, hoping that the signals are all properly configured and we’ll be able to do some genetics.

Once the hour is up, I click on a “stop recording” button, at which time zoom plays with all the data and sends it to me by email, where I can download the images from my presentation (which I already have, in higher quality), the output from an awkwardly placed camera on the ceiling, and a horrible muddy audio recording that sounds like something broadcast from beneath the sea.

I’m going to contact the IT department this week and see if they can’t show me something simple and elegant that doesn’t require me to show up 15 minutes before class starts to jump through stupid digital hoops in order to do my job. I have little hope that that will happen.

I could just show up to class with my own video projector and a GoPro and be up and running in two minutes, with everything functioning more reliably. I am strongly tempted to do just that.

I’m also prepared to just throw out all the tech and teach naked with a whiteboard and a black dry erase marker. It might be easier.

I guess men need rules and structure to contain their barbarisms

Remember the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, that field station where the boys ran wild and made life miserable for women scientists working there? Nature recently published a bit of a follow-up. It sounds like not much has changed. The Smithsonian is going to form a task force (they haven’t done it yet), and now they’ve finally put locks on all the bedroom doors. I’m not seeing any mention of changes to the culture of hard partying that was rife at the station, nothing but a recognition that people at remote field stations drink a lot.

The dynamics of an island-based research institute where people live, work and socialize together complicates efforts to protect researchers, Tewksbury says. “Strong power imbalances, coupled with close, informal working environments, large age differentials and alcohol all increase the risk of abuses of power and sexual harassment,” he says. “The two main venues where that wicked cocktail is mixed up are field research stations and conferences.”

“It would be a mistake to say [sexual misconduct] is a problem with STRI per se,” Crofoot says. “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions are a common thing at field stations. There’s a need for institutions to recognize that they can’t continue to ignore these problems.”

You know, these stations are work places. Most such places have rules about getting drunk at work, and age differentials are common. If, at the end of a long day of classes, I brought out a couple of bottles of tequila and started flirting with students, I would be fired so hard, and would lose the respect of my peers, and would probably be hauled away by campus police, not to mention getting kicked in the crotch by some 20 year old student athlete. Why are field stations being given a pass on “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions”? This dichotomy in how we treat professionals working in different environments is intolerable. I understand the privilege and responsibility of having a position at a university, why should being employed to work in a field station be any different?

But Crofoot is right. These are problems everywhere. It’s just that when people get away from oversight in a place with a “boys will be boys” attitude, some of them run amuck. Why, here in more civilized parts of academia, everyone knows you’re supposed to sneak around when taking advantage of your underlings.

Like the president of the University of Michigan did.

The University of Michigan Board of Regents has unanimously fired school President Mark Schlissel for cause following an investigation into a relationship with a subordinate, the board announced Saturday evening.

In a letter to Schlissel posted on the school website, the board spelled out its concerns and said his conduct was “particularly egregious considering your knowledge of and involvement in addressing incidents of harassment by University of Michigan personnel, and your declared commitment to work to ‘free’ the University community of sexual harassment or other improper conduct.”

He was exposed by a long history of suggestive emails between himself and the woman employee. He also had a history of talking big about stopping sexual harassment, while also promoting a system of reporting that disadvantaged victims trying to get justice.

Also, email? Does anyone really think the campus email system is a secure way to discuss your criminal activities?

Another small sacrifice to the pandemic gods

I have to start teaching in-person on Tuesday, and I’ve laid in a supply of N94 and N95 masks in my office, which now leads to an unfortunate consequence: to fit well, the beard had to go. I shaved it off yesterday.

This is horrible. I have relied on that beard to hide half my homely face for decades now, and suddenly I’m naked and exposed. At least when I’m out and about I get to cover it with a big mask, which helps. But worse, I’m used to having a face covered with the downy soft fur of a kitten, a pleasant tactile sensation. This morning I woke up with a sandpaper face. Coarse sandpaper. Something I could use to strip corrosion off of rusted iron girders. I just shaved again (I have to do this every day now?) ten minutes ago and it just feels like I’ve switch to a finer grit.

How do you clean-shaven men bear it? When did our culture decide this barbarous custom of shearing off our soothing soft pelts was de rigueur? I’m feeling oppressed already. This is sex based discrimination! I have to carry the burden of artificial depilation now, just to keep this stupid virus away from my respiratory system.

Also, I’d forgotten what my chin looked like. I really didn’t miss it.

A tempting offer

Do you feel like moving to Minnesota? The town of Middle River has an offer for you!

Attention waterfowl hunters who dream about moving closer to marshlands north and west. The goose capital of Minnesota will award you seven-tenths of an acre inside its city limits if you move there and build a house.

That’s right: Zero down, zero interest and zero payments on a roomy 100-by-300-foot lot in Middle River, a town of 300 people set between Agassiz National Wildlife Refuge and the state’s well-known Thief Lake Wildlife Management Area. That’s a combined 182 square miles of breeding grounds and habitat for ducks, geese, shorebirds, song birds, raptors, deer, bear, wild turkeys, grouse, wolves and more.

The incentives don’t stop there. Under the civic growth program launched in 2018 and expanded last year, the welcome packet sponsored by this outdoors-minded community also includes a one-year membership to the local Sportsmen’s Club, a free building permit, two free years of municipal water and sewer, free electric hookup, three months of free cable TV, a $100 gift certificate to the local tavern, and a free, 12-month subscription to The Honker, the community’s newspaper.

Free land? Free beer at the local (and probably only) tavern? How can you turn that down?

It’s only 340km (200 miles) due north of Morris, and the current temperature is a balmy -15°C. They don’t mention it, but there’s probably good ice fishing up there. It’s almost Canada!

I have an idea: let’s do whatever South Korea does

They sure seem to do something right. I haven’t seen any evidence that their economy has been significantly harmed, either.

My daughter-in-law Ji and grandson Knut are currently stuck in Korea — passport issues for a four-year-old and tight control over travel — and I don’t know, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be trapped in a country with an effective government and rational health care. They also seem to have sound childcare policies.

The bad news is that his father is stuck in Fort Lewis, Washington, apart from his family.

Random thoughts about pig hearts

A man in Maryland has received a pig heart transplant. What an interesting idea! People have been talking about xenotransplants of this magnitude for decades, and now someone actually gets to try it. It’s also a terrifying idea.

  • My first thought was of Baby Fae, the infant in 1984 who received a baboon heart. It was a disaster. The surgeon didn’t believe in evolution and dismissed concerns about the degree of relatedness, and the donor was blood type AB and Fae was type O. They also didn’t have any means of genetically modifying the baboon. Would you believe there are ethical concerns and responsibilities in this sort of thing?
  • The Washington post article is all about the ethics of the surgery, which is good. It takes a really cock-eyed perspective, though: the recipient was a bad guy who stabbed and paralyzed someone, failed to pay court-ordered compensation to his victim, and also has a history of being sloppy and undisciplined about his medications. Should he have been given this gift?
    YES.
    Jesus, it’s not even in question. Doctors should deliver health care based on need, not passing judgment on the worth (in all senses of the word) of their patient. What next? Will doctors decide on my treatment based on my credit score? Yeah, you don’t have to tell me that here in the good ol’ USA that is the de facto situation. It’s not good.
  • For the retribution crowd, relax. He is being punished. He’s an experimental guinea pig for a treatment that’s going to buy him a little time. The pig was extensively manipulated with 10 genes modified to reduce, but not totally eliminate, the chance of rejection. He’s going to be trapped in a hospital bed for a good long while, with nurses waking him up every few hours through the night to do blood tests, and he’s going to be taking so many pills. I’ve been in that place for relatively trivial surgeries, it’s a necessary hell. Have a little pity.
  • He’s probably going to die in a few months, anyway — I’ll be surprised if his new heart isn’t shredded by rejection in short order. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if he gets a significant survival time, though, since that means this could be a very promising treatment for everyone.
  • Except the pigs. You do realize that this implies the existence of pig farms for animals whose fate is to be chopped up as needed for organs, right? It’s a tiny drop in the slaughterhouse bucket, since humans butcher 1.5 billion pigs per year to make pulled pork sandwiches and bacon, so it’s not the numbers that are daunting, it’s the fact that right now there are cloned pigs being modified and raised in artisanal farms in the hopes that genetic refinement will make them incredibly valuable to corporations. These are long term investments!
  • No one is talking about how much these expendable pigs cost. We aren’t talking about the ethics from the pig’s perspective, and we’re suspiciously mum about what the bill is going to be. This lucky (?) fellow in Maryland is benefitting from a bit of scientific curiosity — hey, we’ve been raising all these special pigs for a decade or so, how about if we splice one heart into a test subject and see what happens — but if it works and becomes a relatively routine intervention, who’s going to be able to afford it?
  • While I’m on the pig’s side, what do these gene modifications do to the health of the pig stock? Does this compromise their immune systems? Are these going to be bubble-pigs that need to be raised in a sterile environment?
  • I got to wondering about the scientific methodology behind making pigs with all these genetic modifications. Here’s an article on practical approaches for knock-out gene editing in pigs. It’s a multi-step, multi-generational process to produce pigs with specific mutations. Scientists have been working for years to make these pigs.

    Schematic workflow of the different steps needed to generate a gene edited pig. (A) Efficiency analysis of mutations induced by CRISPR-Cas9 system. (B) Different strategies to generate one-cell stage porcine edited embryos. (C) Gene editing analysis of the founder pigs (F0) and offspring produced by crossbreeding F0 pigs (F1).

  • The above article describes the mechanics, but not the research that goes into discovering candidate genes to reduce the immune response. Everyone is fumbling forward in the dark, finding likely genes that are affecting rejection, but they have to put that pig donor tissue in a human host to see if they actually got ’em all. This man in Maryland is very much a wildly experimental test subject, a scientific experiment in progress. The most likely result is they’ll find that “oops, we missed an important gene” and they’ll go back to the pig farm with a new CRISPR/Cas target and raise another generation with 11 modified genes for the next attempt. Meanwhile, this host is dead. But he will have contributed to Science with his demise!

Anyway, my brain is currently split between a Frankensteinian fascination with this bold experiment, and a humane dismay at the cost in suffering for humans and pigs.