Monologuing at the microscope: you can wake up to me trying to say nice things for a change

Don’t laugh too hard. I’ve been wallowing in despair and stress for a year, and it’s not good for me, so I thought I’d try to force myself to say good things about my self. Think Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” except I don’t go so far as to claim people like me — I’ve got to be realistic in my affirmations.

Anyway, I had to spend some time in some tedious light microscope work, so I just started babbling at the camera while poking at baby spiders with a paintbrush and forceps.

A happy picture

They’re bringing back the chinook salmon in Washington state rivers, where the populations have been destroyed by hydroelectric dams, among other things.

Conor Giorgi, Anadromous Program Manager at the Spokane Tribe of Indians, coaxes one of 51 Chinook salmon into the Little Spokane River, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. Spokane Tribe of Indians, Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, Inland Northwest Land Conservancy released the adult Chinook salmon from the Wells Salmon Hatchery into the river. Salmon have not been in the Little Spokane in 111 years. This is part of a larger effort to reintroduce sustainable salmon populations above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams.

Although, I have to ask, did they really have to bring up the Program Manager’s sexuality in the text? I say that as someone entirely sympathetic with the anadromous lifestyle, and who would be swimming back to the sea myself if I weren’t so darned timid and straight-laced (I’d probably call myself diadromous, actually, I’m open-minded about which way you swing).

Bumps and lumps and crannies, oh my

I’ve been informed by Spirobranchus that a preprint of Rhawn Joseph’s latest ravings is available. How could you? I have baby spiders that require tending, and you serve up this colossal distraction?

At least it’s exactly what I predicted: page after page of color glossy photos with circles and arrows. Unfortunately, he missed the mark on making a homage to Alice’s Restaurant, though, because it’s not 28 photos…it’s FORTY ONE PAGES OF NASA PHOTOS. 41. He really thinks mind-numbing repetition will make his point.

Here’s an example from page 15. Can you find the tube worms?

I know I can’t. Even the red circles don’t help. So let’s look at page 20, where the red rectangle will help us focus on the really important features in the photograph.

Hey, man, have you ever like really looked at dirt? It’ll like blow your mind, man.

You know what else is really annoying? None of these images have legends or captions, they don’t even have figure numbers. The body text mentions that the results are summarized in Table 3, but there are no tables in the preprint. The text also references figures 5, 7, and XX, and that’s it — how do you justify 41 pages of figures without even mentioning their existence? This is particularly galling because I tell my students, who have to write simple little lab reports, that every figure must have an explanatory caption, they must all be numbered, and each figure has to be referenced in the body text. If it isn’t cited or explained, I get to just rip it out and ignore it. I have failed student work that commits even a fraction of the sins in this work that the author thinks is ready for peer review. This paper is a very, very bad rough draft by an exceptionally lazy and undisciplined author, with essentially no thought about the data, and no real analysis.

Further, the paper has 40 references listed; 22 of them are by Rhawn Joseph. Let’s add that the author is lazy, undisciplined, and exceptionally vain.

Are you ready for the conclusion?

If the specimens identified in this report are alive, fossilized, mineralized, or dormant is unknown. That they are biological is obvious. Thus, the specimens presented in this report serve as further evidence that there is and was life on Mars.

Jesus. None of the photos show anything that is biological, obvious or otherwise. This thing is an unprofessional mess that wouldn’t even pass muster in an introductory high school biology class.

Joe Rogan and Tim Pool: Seriously? How can anyone listen to these people?

Joe Rogan is probably the most popular “news” source on the internet right now, but goddamn, it would be nice if the popular sources actually knew anything. Thanks, YouTube, your algorithm is one of the primary enablers of evil in America.

His latest inanity, the latest among many, is that he is spreading COVID misinformation.

Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. You can watch the video below [Nah, I’m not including a Rogan video here–pzm]. But before you do, the lead scientist and author of the study who spent 10 years conducting this research has something to say. Because he’s horrified.

“Joe Rogan is getting this completely wrong,” says Andrew Read, professor of biology and entomology at Pennsylvania State. “He’s taking very careful work about evolutionary scenarios of the future, and from that, erroneously concluding that people should not be vaccinated now.”

Right. Rogan claimed that vaccinated people were a reservoir of variation in the human population. This is not true, as the author of the scientific paper plainly says.

“Evolution, at the moment, is all happening in the unvaccinated. That’s where the majority of cases are. That’s the majority of transmission. Every time a virus replicates, it can mutate. So the evolution is, right now, occurring in the body of people who are not vaccinated. Rogan is completely wrong trying to deduce anything else.”

If you were to listen to Rogan’s video, you’d see it’s one meathead having a conversation with another nobody, misrepresenting the work but claiming that he has a scientific paper proving his point (it doesn’t) while complaining that you have to get vaccinated to hang out in a bar, followed by a lot of conspiracy theory bullshit. That’s the discourse. This is where we’re at, the state of public science communication of significant information is now in the hands of assholes.

Speaking of assholes and misinformation, have you ever heard of Tim Pool? He’s big. He’s making millions of dollars off YouTube programming and biased lying to the public. The Daily Beast just posted a lengthy exposé on Pool.

…Pool has discovered a style of commentary and audience where a lack of knowledge or journalistic skills might not prove an impediment to success. In some ways, incuriosity and incapacity serve as valuable attributes in this medium. Not solely because of the political valence but thanks in part to how YouTube itself functions: rewarding the kind of high-volume, sensationalized, and sloppy churn Pool specializes in.

And it has made Pool both exceedingly rich and one of the most-watched independent YouTube political pundits in the country—over 3.3 million subscribers, 1.5 billion views, and, by all estimates, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month. He earned $600,000 just in August 2020 and “most of it” came from YouTube, Pool claimed in the recorded conversation.

It’s stunning that that much money is cheerfully forked over to an incompetent grifter by YouTube and Google. You’d think somebody at those companies would look up and notice that they’re enabling some of the worst journalism on the planet, and that maybe they ought to adjust their algorithm to disable its bias in favor of screeching sensationalist jerks. We’ve long been plagued with tabloid-style yellow journalism, but somehow YouTube has figured out a recipe for turning it into even more money.

At the same time, though, some people manage to produce excellent content on YouTube, which will never be rewarded as profligately as the garbage Tim Pool or Joe Rogan churns out. For example, here’s a beautifully detailed dissection of Tim Pool — it’s worth listening to the whole thing, if you have the patience. I was a bit worried at the beginning, because the creator starts by praising Pool’s goals and claims, and I started thinking that this might be a puff piece by a fan…but never fear, as he continues, he carefully shows how everything Pool says is a self-aggrandizing lie by a lazy pseudojournalist. It’s a thoroughly damning analysis.

Give all of Tim Pool’s money to that guy. It’s too bad they won’t, because sensationalist lying and crazy conspiracy theories bring more views and advertising dollars.

Rhawn Joseph is fishing with worms now

Oh, dear. Rhawn Joseph is at it again.

He has a new, exciting, batshit loony paper to publish in his website-masquerading-as-a-journal, titled “Tube Worms on Mars: More Proof of Life on the Red Planet”. I haven’t seen it. I am capable of judging it by his past work, though, and am confident that it will be a collection of photographs pulled from NASA, selected for the presence of the appearance of holes, and the text will basically be a litany of rationalizations for how they kinda sorta look like earthly tube worm burrows, therefore they are tube worm trace fossils. It’s the rankest nonsense.

So this tweet was put out to warn the worm community (yes, Virginia, scientists who study worms form a fairly tight collaborative community — it’s cool) that Rhawn Joseph has put out a call for reviewers for this paper. Now here’s the deal, though: the paper is going to be published. There is also a tight collaborative community of cranks that I dubbed the Panspermia Mafia, and some among them will readily rise up to give a cursory peer evaluation of the work, and rubber stamp their approval. It is going to appear in the funny pages of the Journal of Astrobiology, and you can’t stop it.

However, the warning is still a good idea, because what Joseph is actually doing is fishing for a) real scientists who might think this kind of thing is amusing and let it pass, legitimizing it or b) new gullible cranks to join his community.

You really don’t want to join the Panspermia Mafia. The initiations are brutal — they pelt you with idiocy until your brain melts.

P.S. I’ll probably read it and laugh at it when good ol’ Rhawn dumps it on to the web, so you’ll probably see it here. I pelt you with idiocy, too!

How many spiders is too many spiders?

My heart says you can’t have too many spiders, but my brain says, “Whoa there, that’s a lot of spiders to sort out and feed.” Then my brain has second thoughts and realizes many of the babies will die, so we better get extras, and then agrees with my heart. So many spiders to to separate into vials…and more to come.

Uh-oh

I collected all these egg sacs yesterday, and this morning I find that two of them are already hatching out.

I know what I’m doing this morning!

I broke up the first batch of babies, and collected a nice round 100 spiderlings (That’s 100 octal, which is the natural base for spiders to use, which is 64 for you ten-fingered creatures). Only two escaped! So there are a couple of little baby spiders toddling around somewhere in my lab, I hope they find enough to eat.

I never met him, but still feel the loss

In the mid-70s, as a young undergraduate at the University of Washington, I got involved in orca watching. It wasn’t a big deal, I had these identification cards for the J, K, and L pods, and on weekends I’d either go to lookouts on the Puget Sound coast, or on a couple of occasions, took thrilling rides on a university oceanographic vessel. It was long, long ago, and it feels like it. How did I end up in the Midwest, I dunno.

Anyway, this makes me sad. The Puget Sound orcas are not doing great, with their stocks of their favorite food, salmon, diminishing. Who’s responsible for that, I dunno. Now one of the charismatic killer whales, K21 Cappuccino, has died.

K21 Cappuccino was a gregarious, curious, and kindly orca. He liked to engage in play behaviors—breaching, spyhopping, slapping his pectoral fins. And he was generally quite fearless about approaching human boaters who were in his waters. He seemed to always be curious about the crazy monkeys.

The 35-year-old male, sadly, has now joined the procession of endangered Southern Resident killer whales who have been dying at precipitous rates over the past five years, reducing the entire population now to 74 whales. He was last seen a week ago in a badly emaciated state, struggling against the tidal currents on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, far behind the rest of his clan; it is presumed that he has since died.

I never even knew this whale — he was born after I’d left the West coast and was living in Utah, of all places. Whole generations of orcas have lived and died (mostly died, it seems) since I abandoned the Pacific shores, and now I’m sad for what never was and will never be.