No wonder the calendar in my brain was beeping at me

I polished off all the grading on a quiz, an exam, and a lab so far today, but I’ve got a few more things I have to finish to be caught up. I was wondering why I was feeling so overwhelmed with work this weekend and then I remembered … in a normal year, in a normal Fall term, we have a fall break in mid-October, and so most years ’round about now, I’d be getting a 4-day weekend which I always have used to get a bit ahead of the work piling up. This year we’re on an accelerated schedule, starting the semester a week early, skipping any breaks, and rushing ahead to finish the semester at Thanksgiving. I think my rhythm is off.

Argh. Now back to the grading.

I’ll have you know it’s getting a little too bright and cheery around here

I stepped away from my computer for just a few minutes, went a few paces outside my door, and got blasted by the actinic rays of the sun, my lungs were scoured by a breath of fresh air, and then I went blind by these glaringly bright trees everywhere.

Don’t worry, I fled back inside and am back in my safe, dim room reading electronic submissions from students with the brightness of the monitor turned down, preciousesss. The lightses are too brightses, they is.

The Tiger Mafia might lose a kingpin

It’s a small thing in the grand mess we’re in, but it’s still good to see that “Doc” Antle, the insufferable exploiter from that Tiger King documentary, has been charged with felonies for his abuse of animals.

Bhagavan Antle, who is known as Doc and is the owner of Myrtle Beach Safari in South Carolina, was charged with two felony counts related to wildlife trafficking and 13 additional misdemeanors, according to the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia. Tawny Antle and Tilakam Watterson, daughters of Mr. Antle, are also facing several misdemeanor charges in connection with animal cruelty and alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act.

You know, everyone in that documentary was an awful person. Can we just arrest them all and get it over with?

The arrogance of TERFs

The Royal Society of Biology is celebrating Biology Week 2020, and some random TERFy twit saw it as an opportunity to declare that sex is determined at conception, observed at or before birth and is immutable, none of which is universally true. I’m particularly annoyed at the claim that sex is determined at conception. To a real biologist, “determination” is a specific term with a specific definition — “The normal process by which a less specialized cell develops or matures to become more distinct in form and function” — and sex is most definitely not determined at conception, but emerges progressively over time, requiring many genes and many cellular interactions to reach its final state. In humans, the process isn’t even complete at adolescence!

So take note of how the Royal Society of Biology responds to that TERFy intrusion.

“Please take your transphobia out of our hashtag please. BYE”. Hah.

You know, you can disagree with the consensus of biologists. You can disagree with the major scientific societies. You can disagree with the big name biology journals. But when you do that, you can no longer assert that biology, as a generic institution, supports your claims. To be honest, you have to admit to dissenting from biology, and then you’re likely to make gross errors of fact, as @TriciaFasman did with her claim that sex is determined at conception.

Yet they persist, and there’s Ms Fasman lecturing the Royal Society of Biology on biology to defend a fantasy author’s misconceptions about biology. Sweet. I’m used to TERFs hectoring me about their bogus understanding of biology, but wow, here’s one self-righteously wagging a finger at a whole scientific society. The arrogance is impressive.

But hey, if you really think fantasy authors have more authority in biology than, you know, biologists, you can always find that Neil Gaiman and Stephen King are saying the words “trans rights”, and they’re both far better writers than Rowling.

(Seriously, TERFs, if you try to comment here that you’ve got the backing of biology supporting your claims, I’m going to laugh at you and swing the banhammer, just as I do with racists and creationists who pretend that biology supports their fuckwittery. It doesn’t.)

[random attribute] + [subjective, complex phenomenon] → BAD STUDY

You’d think reviewers and journals would figure this formula out. It’s practically a guaranteed recipe for a bad paper. Pick some random feature, like, say, carrying a guitar case. Then correlate it with some messy, subjective and almost impossible to measure property, like sexual attractiveness. Bingo! You are guaranteed to generate statistics, whether positive or negative, and can find an undiscriminating journal somewhere that will publish it. Then, even better, some tabloid will pick up the story and give you publicity with headlines like, “CARRY A GUITAR TO ATTRACT THE LADIES!”

I didn’t pick my examples at random. There actually was a paper titled “Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context”, now retracted, that tried to make that claim with crappy (and probably faked) statistics.

The same author, Nicholas Guéguen, also had a paper retracted previously that claimed that high heels make women sexier. Oh, I should have mentioned — another important element of the recipe is to make sure one of the elements has something to do with sexual stereotypes.

Apparently, Nicholas Guéguen has published about 340 papers using the magic formula. Publishers still haven’t caught on. Or they have, and they don’t care, they just want more garbage to churn.

It’s depressing.

Rivers running to the sea!

Trump has something novel to complain about. In addition to failing to rake their forests, California allows their rivers to flow.

To add to the irony, he complains to Hannity that AOC and others are “not-bright people” who “don’t have any experience with the environment”.

Why is this nincompoop still president?

Baby spiders are voracious

As long as I was up early, I darted into the lab and fed my horde of baby spiders. I think I may need to increase their feeding frequency because whoa, they were eager. The tubes they are living in are a dense maze of silk, so you drop a fly in and they are instantly trapped and flailing about, and the babies just home in right away. They’re currently still a little smaller than a fruit fly (but they’re fattening up nicely), making for a nice little battle with a juicy reward at the end.

The adults, on the other hand, are experiencing a bit of seasonal malaise, I think, and are a bit sluggish. I’m going to have to do a major cleanup of their cages and maybe that’ll brighten them up a bit…but that’ll have to wait until after Thanksgiving. I just have too much to dooooooooo…

Dang it, woke up too early

I’m just a simmering mass of anxieties nowadays, so I woke up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

What really annoyed me, though, is that was about the time my dad would wake us up to go fishing on a charter boat. We’d get up at this absurd hour, and head out to the docks where we’d stop at a restaurant full of salty dogs and chow down on a big platter of pancakes. So now I’m craving pancakes.

Then we’d get on the boat and cruise out over the Columbia bar, which was always a thrill ride that put stomachs full of pancakes at risk, but never bothered me much. Now I want a boat ride on 20 foot swells.

A full day of fishing, catching our limit of salmon early, then dropping our lines down deep and catching a load of bottom fish, cod and halibut, then heading home for a dinner of fresh salmon, and brining the rest for the smokehouse. Now I want my salmon.

This is Minnesota, though, and I’ve got a day of lecturing and grading ahead of me. Need ocean, as long as I’m getting up before sunrise anyway. Do early mornings flood native Midwesterners with memories of milking the cows or harvesting the corn or whatever? Because I’m lacking that connection.