I guess that means those lovely days of sitting alone in my home office in my underwear with Radiohead playing on the speakers while I struggle to prepare teaching materials are over, and instead I begin those lovely days of sitting alone in my home office in my underwear with Radiohead playing on the speakers while I struggle to deliver teaching material online.
Maybe I should put on pants to highlight the subtle distinctions here.
Florida takes an early lead, with a Republican lawmaker suggesting we aim a hair dryer up our nose to treat COVID-10.
Florida Okeechobee County Commissioner Bryant Culpepper (R) referenced a program he said he saw on One American News Network on how to combat the coronavirus, the Lake Okeechobee News reports.
Said Culpepper: “One of the things that was pointed out in this interview with one of the foremost doctors who has studied the coronavirus said that the nasal passages and the nasal membranes are the coolest part of the body. That’s why the virus tends to go there until it then becomes healthy enough to go into the lungs.”
He added: “This sound really goofy, and it did to me too, but it works. Once the temperature reaches 136 degrees Fahrenheit, the virus falls apart, it disintegrates. I said how would you get the temperature up to 136 degrees? The answer was you use a blow dryer. You hold a blow dryer up to your face and you inhale through your nose and it kills all the viruses in your nose.”
Do I need to explain that that wouldn’t work at all, and would probably be deleterious to your sinuses?
By the way, One America News Network is a conspiracy-peddling, far right paranoid network that promotes nothing but pro-Trump bullshit. Don’t trust it.
Last week there was an article published by a guy named Aaron Ginn in Medium, which purported that the current pandemic was going to fade out relatively quickly and do far less harm than others expected. The article was spread widely — you might even say it went viral — and some big names in media promoted it. It was recently taken down, though, and I can’t link to it, nor would I, even if I could. It was a terrible article.
It was interesting as an exercise in critical thinking, though. The first week of my introductory biology course I share a bad science article with the students, and ask them to figure out how they would know whether to trust it or not. They quickly do the usual stuff — look at the source, look at the author, look at the quality of the data — which should have been the response to this article by Ginn…but no. It says things people wanted to hear, so it was disseminated uncritically.
What should have been noticed right away is that Ginn has zero qualifications in epidemiology, yet here he is claiming that the scientists were all wrong. You might be wondering what his qualifications are. He’s a silicon valley tech bro who claims to be an expert in “growth”, meaning how to increase the popularity of products online. Because he uses the word “virality” in his advertising and promotion work, surely he must be a master of the biology of real viruses. He even claims you don’t need a special degree to do epidemiology.
Jesus. Red flags and signal flares popping off all over that mess. The arrogance of these silicon valley dudes knows no limits, and we ought to be able to stop there. Except that Mr Ginn was quite annoyed when his silly, ignorant article was yanked, and he ran yipping and whining to other unqualified media personalities, like Brit Hume, Greg Guttfeld, and Steven Crowder (seriously, dude?), none of them with any qualifications in the subject, either. He’s being censored, don’t you know. He’s now frantically and rather indignantly defending his claims on Twitter. Someone ought to tell him that Brit Hume, let alone Crowder, isn’t exactly a smart guy to cite, and rather obviously his choice of who to beg for props is telling. Ginn writes for Breitbart in his spare time, and works with the California Republican party.
Anyway, ignore Ginn and his bad paper. Go read this Twitter thread by Carl Bergstrom, who actually knows what he’s talking about.
1. I hate to invest precious time on taking apart the atrocious @aginnt article pictured below, but it is getting too much traction here and even in traditional media.
This thread could be far longer than it is, but I'm doing my best to only discuss the most glaring flaws. pic.twitter.com/EFA7ATQRbX
— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) March 22, 2020
Ginn is puking up exactly the kind of misinformation that ought to be filtered out — he’s cocky and full of himself, but he knows pretty much nothing about the subject he’s lying about.
Often, on a weekend I’d go to our local theater to see whatever was booked, no matter what it was. That was right out this weekend for two reasons. One, the movie playing was I Still Believe, “The true-life story of Christian music star Jeremy Camp and his journey of love and loss that looks to prove there is always hope.” Jesus. No. Just no. The theater does this every once in a while, booking some dreadful Christian dreck, usually at the request of local churches, to lure in the believers. They tend to come in droves. I wondered whether this was a cunning plan to bring in a mass of Christians to cross contaminate each other and terminate that ugly segment of the population, but no, the people who run the theater are nice and try to be accommodating to the community. Only I am wicked enough to imagine using cheesy evangelical Xian movies to seduce the faithful into embracing an epidemic.
Besides, the second reason I couldn’t go to the movies was that the theaters are all shut down. The plan was foiled.
But I still have Netflix! I started browsing, and perhaps it was my anti-Xian fuming that made it leap out at me, but The Wicker Man is available. No, not The Wicker Man, the 2006 abomination with Nicolas Cage, but the original 1973 movie with Edward Woodward. I remember seeing it when it first came out and enjoying it, but that was almost 50 years ago. It was memorable enough that I remember the plot. Spoilers ahead…but it is a 47 year old movie.
I decided to get out of the house and take a walk. Everything is still dead and brown and frigid outdoors, but I had a cunning plan: I’d visit the university greenhouse! I was disappointed.
Oh, sure, there were colorful flowers.
But I was looking for spiders. The only arthropods I could find were some tiny ants scurrying all over twigs and leaves. You can’t escape ants.
There were some tantalizing dense cobwebs in a couple of close spaces, but the inhabitants weren’t hanging out. Probably lurking. I’ll have to come back and check again.
I’m sure you’ve figured that out.
Dyed my grey beard purple.
Considered dyeing the cat to match, but I’m not that bored. Yet.
Maybe next week…
There are rumors that, by the calendar, we had the first day of spring. The calendar lies. It’s -7°C out here, and while a lot of snow has melted away, the trees are still bare and the lawn is sere.
I’m not calling it spring until I find the first spider outdoors and Mary comes home.
We were incredibly lucky — we had our campus job searches at the end of fall term/beginning of spring term, and we signed on two new faculty just before the coronavirus hit the fan. If we hadn’t, we probably would have postponed the searches until next year and left a lot of good people hanging, wondering what next. I can’t imagine the stress of trying to search for a job right now in the middle of this chaos.
Abe at Oceanoxia doesn’t have to imagine it — he and his wife are both smack in the middle employment uncertainty. He does good work. If you’re in a more fortunate position, check him out and do what you can to help.
I’ve got a lot of family in the Seattle area, and the Boeing disease used to be devastating — Boeing sneezed, and families all across the region would be sent home to shiver and starve. It’s not quite as bad now, but the corporate giant is still a huge influence on the region, and when they screw up, everyone gets to suffer. And wow, but have they been screwing up, with control of the company in the hands of MBAs who really don’t know what they’re doing.
The latest catastrophe, on top of the 737 MAX disasters, is that they used prior profits to buy back stocks to artificially inflate their value, a game that was illegal before Saint Reagan wrecked the economy. That’s the kind of scheme they teach you in business school, I guess, but it means that right now they’ve got no reserves to weather the storm of airplane crashes.
This mad scramble for cash and the existential urge to “preserve cash in challenging periods” comes after this master of financial engineering – instead of aircraft engineering – blew, wasted, and incinerated $43.4 billion on buying back its own shares, from June 2013 until the financial consequences of the two 737 MAX crashes finally forced the company to end the practice. That $43.3 billion would come in really handy right now.
The sole purpose of share buybacks is to inflate the stock price because they make the company itself the biggest buyer of its own shares. But those $43 billion of share buybacks cost the company $43 billion in cash. Now those buybacks have stopped because Boeing needs every dime of cash to stay liquid and alive, and shareholders, who’d been so fond of those share buybacks, are now getting crushed by the damage those share buybacks have done to Boeing’s financial position.
I suspect airlines are facing dramatic losses of revenue as people stay home on top of that, so few companies are going to buy airplanes. Boy, aren’t those clever financial wizards running the show really great at lining their own pockets, but not so good at running an aerospace company? And yet the Republican government’s solution to economic problems is to hand these kinds of wizards even more money that they will convert into personal wealth at the expense of the company’s worth and health.
