Who is paying for this “service”?

I find it hard to believe any institution is shelling out money for these authoritarian proctoring services.

When University of Florida sophomore Cheyenne Keating felt a rush of nausea a few weeks ago during her at-home statistics exam, she looked into her webcam and asked the stranger on the other side: Is it okay to throw up at my desk?

He said yes. So halfway through the two-hour test, during which her every movement was scrutinized for cheating and no bathroom breaks were permitted, she vomited into a wicker basket, dabbed the mess with a blanket and got right back to work. The stranger saw everything. When the test was finished, he said she was free to log off. Only then could she clean herself up.

“Online proctor” services like these have already policed millions of American college exams, tapping into students’ cameras, microphones and computer screens when they take their tests at home. Now these companies are enjoying a rush of new business as the coronavirus pandemic closes thousands of American schools, and executives are racing to capture new clients during what some are calling a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This is contrary to any good teaching practice. When your paranoia is so great that you no longer trust your students to learn, then you can’t teach effectively. What is wrong with the University of Florida, or anyone else who coughs up money to have strangers sit and stare at their students?

If my university required this kind of nonsense, I’d tell them to fuck off, no way am I subjecting students to this kind of humiliation. Fortunately, I think most of my colleagues would express the same sentiment.

Doing the right thing saves lives

I’m home alone and kind of miserable, but am willing to pay that small price if it reduces the death toll. It looks like Minnesota’s efforts might pay off!

When Walz issued the two-week stay-at-home order, the goal was an 80% reduction in face-to-face contact and viral transmission.

Modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests this is working. Deaths so far haven’t been increasing in Minnesota at the expected exponential rate, prompting the institute to lower its forecasted COVID-19 deaths in the state from around 2,000 two weeks ago to 932.

“We’re seeing the impact of these measures and how early they are” put in place, said Ali Mokdad, chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington.

Meanwhile, a bunch of states with Republican governors are dragging their heels and killing people. That’s what happens when you belong to a party that ignores the data.

Dang, I’m surrounded by three of those states, Iowa, North and South Dakota. When will you guys learn: don’t vote Republican, ever.

We live in a country where Joe Rogan’s dumbass opinions are valued

We are so screwed.

For some reason, our media and many voters think it’s important to weight the opinions of some unqualified meathead named “Joe” — remember Joe the Plumber? — as somehow insightful or precious. It was one of Bernie Sanders’ missteps when he touted Joe Rogan’s endorsement as something worth promoting, when it was actually no more meaningful than a bird landing on his lectern at a rally. We should not be making racists and transphobes more prominent!

Rogan is a flittering twit who tries to pander to his audience of mostly young men, and who likes to appear as a radical with novel ideas. He has no coherent ideas at all. He previously endorsed Sanders, a democratic socialist, praising his consistency. Now he has turned around and endorsed donald trump, saying trump is fine with the pressure of the presidency, even as people are dying all around us from his mismanagement.

He also likes to pretend he is some populist voice-of-the-people, but look who he is talking to when he made this surprise recommendation.

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, wealthy privileged kook.

We should be saying, “Who the fuck cares what some uneducated jock with an online mob of sycophants thinks?” The answer, unfortunately, is our news media.

By the way, he said this in the context of not wanting to vote for Joe Biden. I agree with that — I think Biden will be a maintainer of the status quo, where the status quo is an ongoing catastrophe — but to then prefer an obvious con man and incompetent buffoon is worse. I have more respect for people who say they won’t vote at all than I do for anyone who votes for Trump.

Saturday afternoon creature feature? Sure!

Back when I was a kid, the local stations would have the creature features with the horror host on Friday and Saturday night, but they’d also show them on Saturday afternoons for the kids. It’s Saturday Afternoon. Are you ready for The Giant Spider Invasion? It stars, sorta, Alan Hale Jr. as the sheriff — he’s better known as the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island.

The first lines of dialog:

Young man: “Sheriff!”
Alan Hale Jr: “Hi, little buddy!”

Because of course they are.

Other notable facts: it takes place in northern Wisconsin, but none of the residents seem at all perturbed at finding tarantulas all over the place. Just the usual house spiders, I guess.

The big bad monster is cheesy and fake, but by the standards of low budget horror/skiffy of the day, it’s actually not too bad. They do a good job of framing it with the camera so you can’t see the puppeteers wiggling the legs and moving it along. I want one.

Also by the standards of the genre, they did an OK job imitating the chelicerae of a mygalomorph.

The story ends with an abrupt deus ex machina, but it’s really an excuse to show buckets of multi-colored goo and slime oozing out to an excessive degree from the dead spider puppet. Young me would have appreciated it.

Visit a museum!

That’s bad advice, since in my experience museums tend to be full of excited, eager disease-carriers — I mean, children — and a lot of museums are currently closing their doors and laying off staff. There are still museums with an online presence, though. Here’s a spider expert answering questions at the Burke Museum, and the Bell Museum has video tours of their exhibits. Tell your little disease-carriers kids to sit down and pretend they’re visiting a museum!

Hey, also, when this is all over, and when your finances have recovered…become a member of your nearest museum. They’re all hurting right now, too, and we should appreciate and support our local resources.

Rooting for Australian arthropods in amber

I think the title is a double entendre in Australian, but it’s not a language I am fluent in. Anyway, a paper in Nature describes an assortment of organisms found in amber from Australia and New Zealand, ranging in age from 230 million years to 40 million years. It’s lovely stuff.

Significant bioinclusions of plants and animals in Southern Gondwana late middle Eocene amber of Anglesea, Victoria. (A to B) Liverworts of the genus Radula (Marchantiophyta: Radulaceae). (C) Two stems with perfectly preserved phyllids or leaf-like structures of mosses of the genus Racopilum (Bryophyta: Racopilaceae). (D) Juvenile individuals of spiders. (E to F) Springtail of the living genus Coecobrya (Entomobryomorpha: Entomobryidae) in two views. (G) A Symphypleona springtail. (H) Light photograph of large piece of yellow amber with two dipterans, Dolichopodidae at left and Ceratopogonidae at right, and at top of image a mite of the living genus Leptus (Arachnida: Acari: Trombidiformes: Erythraeidae). (I) Dipterans of the family Dolichopodidae (long-legged flies) in copula. (J) Worker ant of the living genus Monomorium or a “Monomorium-like” lineage (Hymenoptera: Formicoidea: Formicidae).

I don’t know about you, but I was most interested in D, the two juvenile spiders.

Wait, I do know about you — you’re most interested in I, the two flies caught in the act. So here’s a closeup.

Count yourself lucky. Now if you want to take a pornographic selfie, you just whip out your phone, capture the moment, and go on with your life. Forty million years ago, you had to say “Freeze! Look sexy!” and wait for a drop of sap to ooze over you, and then you had to hold the pose for tens of millions of years.

As much coronavirus stuff as I can stand

Let’s get it all out of the way at once, OK? I’ll write a few things about the pandemic, and then anything else I write today will be exclusively non-plague related.

  • In David Brin’s The Postman (skip the movie, read the book), one of the things that struck me as true was that the thing you have to worry about most in the post-apocalypse is the people — especially the militias, the religious fanatics, the conspiracy theorists who make it their life’s mission to make the chaos worse. Well say hello to sick conspiracies endorsed by the likes of QAnon.

    A train engineer at the Port of Las Angeles was arrested on Tuesday after he deliberately derailed a train and crashed it near the Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy over his suspicions that the ship was part of a government takeover, according to a Justice Department statement about the incident.

    Or how about nurses being attacked by racists?

    “A man elbowed my rib, intentionally pushing me to the side, the female partner then shouted racial abuse saying: “at least we are whites you f***ing c***.”

    You might be wondering what the actual pseudo-military militias are thinking right now. It’s not good.

    If COVID-19 sticks around for a while maybe it will snap people out of this false sense of entitlement culture we live in, put your phones down and talk to one another, hold respectful interactions.. a real gut check into what is important, a snap away from our lemmings like existence on earth. a breath of fresh air amid the chaos.

    …

    There will definitely be pros to this experience in addition to the cons. There has certainly been another uptick in new members on here since this has begun.

    Yeah, because the real problem is people spending too much time on their phones, when they should be strutting around town with their AR-15.

  • Would you believe that conspiracy nuts in the UK are claiming that 5G wireless causes COVID-19, and that when that network is activated, everyone is going to die? People are attacking cell phone masts over these baseless fears.

  • Just a thought here. We’re currently seeing a total failure of the supply chain producing PPE gear, and Boy Wonder Jared Kushner is making it worse with his penchant for grabbing at anything not nailed down, or things that are nailed down and committed to other buyers, and hoarding it and saying “mine!” He doesn’t seem to understand how to do the job at all.

    But wait a moment, I thought, I wouldn’t know how to do that job, either. For decades, Republicans have touted the virtues of electing people with business experience, and for once, I can see where someone who was familiar with the principles of keeping goods flowing in an efficient supply chain would be perfect to manage that kind of job, and ought to be appointed there.

    Except — and this is not something I often think about — “businessperson” is not a catch-all occupation. There are diverse roles within a business. And some roles are not at all useful in most situations. A slumlord doesn’t work with supply chains. Neither does a guy who runs casinos into bankruptcy. Neither do Wall Street bankers and insurance company executives. Those are actually the most useless possible qualifications for anybody to do anything other than leech off other people’s money. And who are we putting in positions of power in our country? You guessed it, the leeches and parasites.

  • Don’t read this story. A woman can’t see her dying husband in quarantine, so she has to watch him die over FaceTime. She plays their wedding song to him as he goes. He was only 42.
    And this is where we are.

  • Trump is still president.

I’m done for the day. I’m going to grade exams and listen to the birds sing outside my window.

There are laws about this kind of congregatin’

The snow is back. Not much of it, but it was mixed with freezing rain and now everything is covered with a thin glaze of extraordinarily slippery ice, so I guess Nature is enforcing the stay-at-home order.

These scofflaw birds don’t care at all, though. My yard was covered with sparrows for a while, and the birdfeeder in my front yard has become the most popular meeting spot in the area. KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. STAY INDOORS. Stupid birds.

Maybe I’ll banhammer someone live on video!

I usually avoid the YouTube comments (always good advice), but I noticed that my video on “The Fallacy of Biological Sex” has accumulated over 50 comments — I know, that’s pathetic, but I am a baby YouTuber — so I was going to dive in and clean up and maybe even answer some. Then I thought…I could make a spectacle of it! That’s the YouTube spirit!

So this afternoon, as a break from grading, I thought I’d browse them live at 3pm Central time, right here.

This may be a terrible mistake, but I figure I needed more practice configuring live streams, so let’s go for it.