Need assistance with a social interaction

About once a week, I go into a bait shop (bait shops are far cheaper than pet stores) to buy a bunch of wiggly invertebrates for certain purposes. As I’m leaving with my purchase, the clerk invariably wishes me good luck on my fishing ventures; I’m becoming a familiar enough customer that I expect him to start chatting about what lake I’m ice-fishing at, or about how successful last week’s fishing trip was. This worries me.

So, when the guy says “Good fishing!” as I leave, how should I reply?

  1. “Uh, errm, thanks! Bye!”
  2. “Yes. I’m sure the fishes will find your high-quality invertebrates delectable.”
  3. “EEP! I’m caught!” [runs for the exit]
  4. “Fish? Bwahahaha. No. These are provisions for my spider horde.”
  5. [Stare silently. Remove one worm, pop it into my mouth. Chew contemplatively, as if trying to think how to answer]

I usually answer the first way, I’m sorry to say. How should I reply, and how would you? Better suggestions welcome.

Why do scientists cheat?

I am dismayed at this emerging story about fraud in science. It stars Jonathan Pruitt, a professor at McMaster University who studies variation in individual behavior and how it affects group behavior. I’d heard of him since he’s doing a lot of work in social spiders.

He built up several productive collaborations, in particular with Kate Laskowski at UC Davis, sharing data with her that she used in several publications. That’s where the story turns dark, because Laskowski later examined the data in more detail and found multiple examples of blocks of data having been duplicated, padding the data set with more replicates than were actually done. He’d actually passed her a poison pill that tainted all the work they’ve done together; her papers are no longer trustworthy, and she has retracted them.

Laskowski is being heroically restrained in her reaction to this betrayal — I’d probably be throwing things and saying lots of not-nice words. Pruitt also seems to be peculiarly blasé and detached from the problem, conceding that there are serious problems in the data set, but not offering any explanations about how this has happened (again, if some of my data were found to be bogus, I’d either be furious and trying to track down the source of the bad data, or, if I were guilty of doing the duplications, I guess I’d be trying hard to deflect.)

There’s a lot of discussion and dissection of this issue going on, and most of it seems to be rightly concerned with making sure Pruitt’s coauthors aren’t hit with serious splash damage. At some point, though, there has to be a reckoning, and the source of the contamination tainting so much work will have to be dealt with. So far, everyone seems to be strangely cautious and circumspect.

I will not say Jonathan Pruitt is a victim, but he is part of the tragedy. Will we ever really know what motivated him? I decline to guess. He burst on the animal behavior scene with his first paper in 2008 and immediately began publishing at such a prolific rate that in another year or two he would have overtaken my own 41 year career in numbers of publications. This output got him a lot of academic success leading to his current position (current as I write anyway) of Canada 150 chair at McMaster University.

What Jonathan Pruitt produced was so far beyond average, it is hard to believe anyone would feel pushed to that level. But others feel pressure to produce in academia.

Fine. I’m not involved in any of this concern, so it’s not my place to say how the victims ought to respond. But I would say that the slower the build-up, the bigger the explosion, and so far this is looking to be a truly ugly meltdown at some point in the near future. Keep an eye on Jonathan Pruitt, there will be a supernova at some point soon, and not the good, pretty kind.

I’m mainly dismayed at the failure of scientific ethics. You don’t make up data! Ever! Every year I’m in student labs, explaining to students that “your data is your data” (I literally say that a lot, I’m afraid), and if your experiment didn’t come out the way you expected, or the data are ambiguous about what the one true Answer is, your job isn’t to make the data fit, it’s to rethink your work, track down sources of confusion, repeat the work, analyze the results appropriately, and if it doesn’t support your expected answer, revise your expectations.

That’s easy for me, though. The students don’t have a publication in Nature or a tenure decision in their favor, so they’re lacking all that unscientific pressure to get the neat, tidy, snazzy answer with beautiful p values.

Where we are at

Alan Dershowitz is arguing that:

The procedural posture of Trump’s Senate impeachment trial as it ends is this: the Democrats asked for witnesses to help prove X, and the Republicans refused, on the explicit ground, put forth by Alan Dershowitz, that even if X were proven to be true, it could not — literally could not — be a valid basis for removing a president via the impeachment and conviction process.

This was, to put it in legal jargon, essentially a motion for summary judgment — that is, a procedure by which one party moves to end a proceeding on the grounds that, even if everything the accusing party is alleging is true, there still isn’t a valid legal basis for a judgment against the accused party, so therefore there’s no need for an actual trial.

What the Republicans agreed was true was this: That Donald Trump held up hundreds of millions of dollars of already appropriated aid to another country, because he was extorting that country’s leadership into announcing a fake investigation into the supposed corruption of the son of a political opponent. That’s what the Democrats alleged Donald Trump did, and that’s what Alan Dershowitz argued could not — again, not should not but could not, constitutionally — be a valid basis for removing a president.

Simpler translation:

And there isn’t a single Republican who recognizes the dangerous precedent this sets? To appeal to their naked self-interest, which is all they’ve got for a moral backbone, do they realize that they are greatly weakening the power and importance of the senate in order to strengthen the executive branch into a tyranny?

Unoccupied

Today dawned cold and foggy — subzero temperatures and a fine cloud of ice crystals everywhere, and you know what that means?

No spiders.

I looked everywhere outside, in likely spots where I’ve seen spiders before — in, like, July — but no luck at all. Here are a few photos of my failures. Disappointing.

Conspiracy theories never die, but maybe they can be penalized

We’re going to have to deal with the rotting excreta of Info Wars for a long time, I fear. But at least one pile of shit has been shoveled up: Wolfgang Halbig has been arrested.

Halbig, in case you’ve happily forgotten, was one of those conspiracy zealots who was convinced that the murder of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School was faked, and who harassed parents and administrators endlessly. He is a revolting human being.

Mr. Halbig, 73, a former Florida public school security administrator, has sent hundreds of public records requests to Newtown and Connecticut officials, demanding documents that include photographs of the murder scene, the children’s bodies and receipts for the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45 to 60 gallons of blood.”

Soon after the massacre, Mr. Halbig appeared multiple times on Infowars, which aired his false claims to millions of people and gave him a platform for raising tens of thousands of dollars to fund his obsession.

Alex Jones was so happy with his delusions that he sent a film crew to accompany Halbig on a tour of Newtown, Connecticut as he pestered grieving people with his lunatic accusations. Recall that InfoWars promoted bizarre ideas about chemtrails, aliens, evil immigrant hordes, pig-human hybrids, pedophile rings in pizza parlors, etc., etc., etc., and at its peak was bringing in $20 million/year. It’s lost some of its more popular outlets, but it still exists: right now Jones is preaching that the coronavirus outbreak is really just a rehearsal for forced vaccinations.

We can only hope he and his minions fade into obscurity. Paul Joseph Watson, fuck off.

Yep, that’s the New Jersey I know

Little known fact: in 1877, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was actually trying to paint the people from New York and Philadelphia visiting the Jersey Shore. This was before the American diet made people less sinuous and lithe.

I’m guessing the skinny long-legged boys are Iguanadons lining up to swim across Arthur Kill to Tottenham, while mosasaurs watch from the Raritan River and snakey plesiosaurs and a distinctly gargoyle-like pterosaur gawks at the vicious gang fight from the safety of South Amboy, as the the crook-necked clingy boys from Keasbey tear into the line? It’s interesting how old reconstructions seem to have just scaled up slender lizards to make dinosaurs.

Did this cruel, elaborate prank go too far?

Amazing. A couple of young men set up Katie Hopkins, going to extreme lengths to get her to accept a bogus award — flying her to Prague, booking a fancy hotel, hiring actors to play members of a committee — an award called the Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy, and she fell for it. I might fall for such a prank if someone were to pay me to travel, of course, but she was totally thrilled with the award. I was starting to feel sorry for her.

Then she gave her acceptance speech.

Ohmygod.

She deserves every scrap of mockery she gets.