The Manchurian tangerine has a cunning plan to undermine the American military

Bwahahaha! Bring the officer class together during a pandemic to have a bozo who doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease to lecture at them! Trump has recalled the graduating class of West Point to stand before him in some kind of formation. Why? I don’t know. He just needs the ego boost, I guess.

It remains unclear how the graduation ceremony will actually look. The Naval Academy decided against holding an in-person ceremony at its campus in Annapolis, Md., and opted to hold a virtual event instead, according to The New York Times. The Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. held a ceremony with cadets sitting eight feet apart from each other, with Vice President Mike Pence as its commencement speaker.

Three sources told The Times that West Point still hadn’t made its decision on how to conduct the ceremony, originally planned for late May, when Trump surprised officials there by saying he would speak in person.

I’m amused that they have no idea how best to do this. We’re struggling with it here at UMM, too, but we decided to do an entirely online ceremony, because we’d rather not risk the health of our students. That’s a trifle Trump does not worry about.

I would hope that all the graduates at that ceremony are seated a safe distance apart, and that they all wear masks, because you know no one in the Trump administration will wear them. It makes for great optics to see the disregard Trumpkins have for the safety of others.

Capitalism is not the core philosophy of evolution

Abe Drayton, who appeared in last Sunday’s hangout, has a fine article centered on Mexie’s discussion of the injustice of capitalism towards disabled people. You should watch it, but also read Abe’s commentary.

Capitalism relies on the lie that human nature is all about greed, competition, and aggression. That is not what drives civilization, it’s what constantly tries to dismantle it. Every advance we have made in human wellbeing has come from the mass of people working together against those obsessed with competition and power to create a world that’s better for everyone. Capitalism does not give a damn about you, but fortunately those obsessed with capitalism are wrong – it is not an inevitable result of human nature, it is a perversion of it. A better world is possible, and we can move in that direction the same way we always have – by expanding the “tribe”, by pooling our resources and efforts, by caring for each other, and by using our collective power to force change.

Lay people seized upon Darwin’s idea of natural selection to distort it in directions favorable to capitalism, and started a dreadful feedback loop that justified exploitation — “I’m rich, therefore I deserve to be rich by natural law, and you’re poor, so you don’t deserve what little you have” — and ballooned it into a rationalization for our current nightmare. It’s what allows creationists to caricature evolution as nothing but a history of death and suffering.

It’s more mainstream than that, too…the whole idea of “Darwin Awards” is terrible and unrepresentative, unless you also give the award to individuals who increase the success of others and themselves with generosity and cooperation. The human species did not succeed because they were the best at killing — they’ve always improved our common survival by working together and building communal social structures.

I’m sorry, I got sucked into a vortex last night

I was up late, working on various things, when a stray link wandered across my photoreceptor array, and like a fool I clicked on it. I ended up on seafood YouTube. This is like porn to a west-coastie living deep in the center of the continent, so my eyes glazed over and I started to drool and I was probably looking a bit Homer-esque, I had to watch it all. A sample:

I eventually staggered off to bed, hungry. There is a dearth of exotic seafood here in Minnesota.

Maybe it’s just me, but Pacific seafood looks so much better than Atlantic. It’s also the size — Dungeness vs. blue crab, or geoduck vs. those tiny little clams that are mostly shell. Why bother? I’ve eaten most of the crustaceans and molluscs he brought out, but I’m not so enthusiastic about urchin roe, and what was that weird thing he called a razor clam? I’ve never encountered that thin strange beast. It’s apparently the Atlantic jackknife clam, Ensis leei, but I grew up digging the Pacific razor clam, Siliqua patula, which again is bigger than those reedy little Atlantic specimens.

I was also getting into the casually brutal way he dismantles crustaceans.

Anyway, now I’m hungry and tired, and I have a lot of work to do. I’m tempted to dart off to MSP tonight — flights are cheap I hear — and ruin my health and mental state further by bingeing at a Seattle seafood bar.

Not really. I’m not leaving my house for a while.

More serious analysis of online conferencing, please. It’s our future.

You’d think that after a long period of isolation I’d be looking forward to a return to normality and the opportunity to mingle with others at a conference again. Strangely, I am not. There are great things about real-life conferences, but also great awkwardnesses. I stopped attending the annual Society for Neuroscience conference many years ago as attendance soared past 20,000, which made the face-to-face appeal diminish as we became a faceless mob…and also as it became obvious that a subject as complex and diverse as neuroscience couldn’t be appropriately managed in a one-size-fits-all event.

So I thought this article about organizing scientific conferences online was somewhat informative. I’ve been involved in running a social justice conference online, once upon a time, so I’m familiar with some of the compromises, but it’s good to see some new ideas. Zoom has all kinds of potential, and they used Crowdcast, but I thought the way they applied it was a good mix of traditional and novel uses.

Even the traditional elements were improved.

We largely retained the legacy conference format of a single track for invited talks (30 minutes plus 15 minutes for questions) from established scientists, and contributed talks (18 minutes plus 4 minutes for questions) selected from the submitted abstracts to highlight work from up-and-coming researchers. However, the online platform used – Crowdcast – allowed for some significant innovations. First, everyone was able to see the speaker more clearly than in a lecture theatre. Second, Crowdcast allows anyone to submit a question to ask the speaker at the end, and viewers can vote on those questions. This led to a question and answer session that was considerably more lively and democratic than in a typical legacy conference, where participants often note that the same established professors are asking the same questions at every talk. As in the case of the short talks, it may be better to extend the questions even more to capitalize on the quality of the questions asked in the safer and more democratic online format. The third innovation is the chat window that appears alongside the talk. We did not anticipate how significant this would be. Students and others were able to ask basic questions about definitions or ask for links to papers while the talk was going on. Other participants could answer them in real-time without disrupting the presentation, thereby allowing a deeper level of engagement by the audience than is possible in legacy conferences. Moreover, since recordings of these talk were available immediately after the session, it would be possible to go back and revisit portions of the talk that may have been missed or were presented too quickly.

Right, you’ve got to keep the talks limited to familiar blocks of time. We do a lot of training and practice to maximize information in small specified chunks of time. They didn’t do one hour talks, though? I’m used to conferences with plenary sessions with hour-long time slots for bigwigs in the field…they usually don’t live up to their billing, though. An hour is a long time to fill.

The other thing you need for a conference is the schmoozing. They had a way of doing that that seemed to me to be trying too hard. Typical nerds.

One feature of a legacy conference that would appear to be impossible to replicate online is the social aspect: chance encounters during the coffee breaks, social events or banquets. In place of this aspect, neuromatch algorithmically matched attendees to other like-minded scientists for individual 15-minute chats. We use a combination of topic modeling techniques and linear programming to solve the matching problem based on a sample of their research abstracts (Achakulvisut et al., 2018). The matching part was based on a highly popular experiment carried out at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, but it is particularly well-suited to an online format. There remains considerable scope for further innovations in replicating or improving on the social experience of legacy conferences, especially as the online format may be less socially intimidating.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just randomly put people into small break-out groups? This sounds too planned — one of the benefits ought to be serendipitous encounters using a simple algorithm that assumes every participant is equally interesting with unique attributes that anyone might find productive. One useful parameter I wanted to know is what is the optimal group size for these chats. Was it one-on-one? Half a dozen in a group? Small classroom size with 30 participants?

I suspect that one good thing that will emerge from this pandemic is more online conferences. It vastly reduces the expense, gets rid of the bother of air travel, and helps participants manage their time better. I currently try to attend one conference a year because it’s such a huge investment of time and effort — and this year the one I’d planned on got cancelled, of course. But if they were online, I’d be able to schedule that arachnology conference, the Society for Developmental Biology annual meeting, and SICB every year without killing myself with constant travel to the airport, while still learning new things and engaging with new people. Make it so, scientific societies!

Also, if you’re interested, Skepticon is going online this year. I’ve long wanted to attend Dragon*Con, but it’s been impossible because it always falls during the first few weeks of classes, when I can’t possibly just take off. Of course, if it went online, what would happen to all the cosplay events? And now I want to attend even less, because it’s held in a state where Brian Kemp is the Republican governor who is mismanaging the pandemic, and we’ll probably see another wave about the time Dragon*Con opens for business as a big bustling petri dish. Many Shubs and Zulls will know what it is to be roasted in the depths of a Sloar that day, I can tell you!

I wonder if they’re even considering alternatives — I get the idea that our regional SF con, Convergence, is going ahead with the idea that they’ll be doing business as usual in late August, while developing contingency plans. I’m not so confident. Getting crammed into a single building with thousands of other attendees, many of whom need to be reminded about the basics of hygiene, seems to regularly lead to icky cases of con-crud. Only this con-crud can kill you!

P.S. I’ve only just noticed that searching for “online conferences” produces strange images of people sitting around a conference table staring at a screen on the wall, or the always-popular image of two people shaking hands through a pair of computer screens. I really don’t think they get it. That’s not how it’s going to work, or can work. And shaking hands? Is anyone else feeling repulsed at the idea of physical contact with some stranger’s filthy hands?

You can go too far for Fox News

Diamond and Silk have discovered that there is a level of stupidity that can get them booted from the network.

Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch.

The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.

It’s not clear what exactly triggered some Fox executive somewhere. Was it:

  • claiming that coronavirus deaths were exaggerated?
  • arguing that the virus was engineered?
  • suggesting that WHO had a “switch” to turn the virus on and off?
  • claiming that we had to end the isolation to cultivate an immune response?
  • saying that Bill Gates was promoting vaccines for population control? “Abortions! Genocide!”
  • suggesting that 5G towers were used to fill hospitals for their profit?

If Diamond and Silk (the pro wrestling names of Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) were making the network look bad, what about all those other sycophantic suck-ups like Hannity and Watters and Carlson and Fox & Friends? I don’t think there’s any degree of purging that can rescue the reputation of Fox News anymore.

I’m totally losing it

This cat. This cat is killing me. She’s usually pretty good — I got up this morning, gave her a little time, fed her her wet food (she’s very eager for her twice daily serving of wet food, but she also has a bowl of dry food always available), and then she trotted into my office to jump up on the windowsill and demand that I open the blinds, which I did. She curled up there to watch the world go by.

Then the retching began.

I jumped up to shoo her out of my carpeted office. If she throws up on the kitchen tile, it’s an easy cleanup…but on carpet, oh god no. She jumped down and ran off, and I hear that awful “huck, huck, eeewcchh” noise from under the futon. So I slide the futon away, and what do I see? A lovecraftian nightmare.

Apparently, for the last few months, she has been crawling under the futon when I’m not around and vomiting everywhere. There were slimy fresh puddles and caked dried piles. There was filth and cat hair clinging to everything. I’d show you a photo, but you might react as I did: I actually screamed. I started weeping. It’s all just too much.

Now I’ve got to scrub the most revolting floor I’ve ever seen today, and further, I’ve got to move all the furniture in the house to see if she has other treasure troves.

At least it clarifies one thing: I will never ever adopt another cat. It might be because this monster outlives me, but there is no way I’ll ever be persuaded to take responsibility for another mammal. Repugnant, sneaky, nasty creatures. Spiders are a much more dignified and elegant gentleman’s companion.

Australian rules

I’ve been wrestling with spider taxonomy, and I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. You finally learn to recognize a common spider, and somebody comes along and turns the nomenclature upside down…like this recent case, where the genus Sitticus gets revised to be called Attulus. There’s good reasons for it — detailed molecular phylogeny clarifies relationships — but it’s still infuriating. I remember when Brachydanio rerio was revised to Danio rerio, and I’m still reading papers about Achaearanea tepidariorum despite the fact that we’re now supposed to call it Parasteatoda tepidariorum (at least zebrafish got revised to a shorter, easier to pronounce name).

So screw it. I’m just going to have to adopt the Australian rules for naming spiders.

Morning spider survey

I did my usual quick survey of spiders on the outside of my house. The place is swarming with salticids! Mainly Attulus and Salticus. I’ve done the usual thing of posting photos on iNaturalist and Instagram and Patreon, if you really want to see them. They really like the masonry on the east-facing front of the house, where the stones warm up fast, but I found them all over the place.