I got to play educational games for a couple of days

It’s a great job when you get to do stuff just for fun. For the last few days, I’ve been at the Science Museum of Minnesota, consulting on their new exhibit? Theatrical performance? Interactive game? called Infestation: The Evolution Begins. It’s a 3-part project funded by NSF to help teach key concepts of evolution to kids, and it’s looking pretty amazing.The first part is done, and it’s a theatrical event where the concepts are explained entertainingly, and the audience are introduced to little imaginary creatures called VISTAs. If you go to SMM today, you can watch the whole show yourself, get certified as an official VISTA handler, and get a sticker. A sticker! I got one! Oh, boy!

It stands alone, and is a fun demo. But there’s more! Not available to the public yet, but I was part of a team of consultants brought in to comment on/criticize/maybe improve some preliminary versions of interactive games that follow from Part I. Eventually, kids will be scurrying all over the museum to solve puzzles and address challenges that will require them to learn about biology and evolution. For now, it was just a troop of aging game designers, cognitive psychologists, theater people, museum curators, educators, and biologists running around trying out rough versions (some of the game rooms weren’t quite as polished as they will be). They’ve made great progress on Part II of the project, and I think, maybe, they’re hoping to have it available to the public this summer? Next fall? I’m getting an inside look at what it takes to build a professional and quite elaborate interactive exhibit in a museum, and I’m exhausted just thinking of all the labor and thinking that is done.

I had a lovely couple of days hanging out with the fantastic people who work behind the scenes at SMM — did you know real museums have large staffs of people who are doing, you know, science? — and my fellow consultants, like Scott Nicholson and Jonathan Tweet, who some of you may have already heard of. If you think combining “education” and “games” is going to flop at both, think again. This is serious stuff in the service of fun and learning.

We get to go back at some later date, once Part II is fully operational, and when Part III is in a preliminary state — we had some suggestions, but that bit is still up in the air, as it’s supposed to be a capstone that brings everything the kids learn together. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. You should all be looking forward to a trip to SMM next year when the magic is all ready for prime time.

Friday Cephalopod: They’re going to outbreed us!

Here they come, the legions of cephalopods. Massive aggregations of brooding octopuses were found near Monterey Bay.

That’s not all. The University of Georgia had a single octopus in their aquarium, Octavius, presumed male, until they discovered a surprise one morning.

“I noticed this cloud of moving dots and I realised, ‘Oh my God, she had babies. There are babies. There are babies everywhere.’ And a sort of panic ensued,” aquarium curator Devin Dumont told Mary Landers at Savannah Now.

“I immediately started scooping them out and putting them in buckets and there were just buckets and buckets and buckets full of tiny octopi.”

Finding a tank full of baby octopuses (or octopodes for language pedants) would certainly be enough to shock anybody into mixing up their Greek and Latin word roots.

I, for one, welcome our breeding swarms of transgender octopuses, and will greet them as saviors when they emerge to release humanity from its misery.

You’re not a very arachnophobic bunch

I tallied up your responses from that post about arachnophobia, and took a quick look at the distribution. Several of you complained that you had no idea what the range should be — that was intentional. You’re not supposed to be trying to fit yourself into a particular bin, you should be just answering for yourself. There’s no judgment here!

But if you’re curious, here’s the source with some general numbers. Serious arachnophobia — where the fear is actually debilitating and impairs a person’s life — is relatively rare, less than 5% of the population. There isn’t a magic number in the score that says whether you’re an arachnophobe or not. As many of you also noted, the questions are fuzzy and subjective, and as you might expect, produce a range of results. It’s a continuum — some people want to hug & kiss & love widdle spiders forever, others are horribly repulsed by them, and others are in the range from take ’em or leave ’em to “oooh, icky”. Here’s what I saw in this group of 113 participants (not a scientific poll, obviously, with a self-selected group and arbitrary participation, etc.)

Most of you are way down on the scale! It’s probably a biased sample here — I’ve chased away all the deeply arachnophobic types. I got a few responses on Facebook, and they tended to be somewhat higher than blog commenters, but the numbers are too small to come to any strong conclusions.

Happy Halloween! Too bad I’m missing it

I’m going to be driving, driving, driving today, and then I’m going to spend a couple of days in a hotel, so I’m going to be semi-unreachable for a while. I will be checking in periodically, though, because the trolls just love my days away from home.

One other thing I’m going to be missing is the start of our big legal fundraiser. Skepticon will be putting out a call later today, as will The Orbit, because we just got a big bill from our lawyer, and let me tell you, my heart stopped when I saw all those zeroes, and then it tried to crawl up my throat, muttering threats and imprecations against that petty weasel, Richard Carrier. I think it was ready to bounce all the way to Ohio and choke an unemployed bible scholar, but I told it I needed it and wrestled it back into my chest, where it now rests sullenly. Carrier can thank my cardio-pulmonary needs that there isn’t a small, black, grisly lump of meat pounding on his door right now. Trick or treat, m_____f_____.

Anyway, I’ll check back in now and then with updates on our legal requests. Until then, you can donate directly to Skepticon to help with their payments, which, as a non-profit, is tax-deductible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help out with my share of the legal fees, or those of Amy Frank-Skiba, Stephanie Zvan, or me, so it would be nice if you could also donate to our legal fund.

There are a lot of expenses ahead of us, but fortunately, they’re shared among a group of people, and in addition, we’re counting on a large body of supporters to help distribute the load.

I know it’s Halloween, but I don’t think our lawyer will accept bags of candy, so please send money. If enough of us help out, it doesn’t have to be a lot, every scrap will help.

Skepticon is baaaaack!

The shiny new Skepticon has re-emerged. It’s going to be held on 9-11 August 2019, which is great for me, since it doesn’t fall in the heart of the Fall Semester anymore, and it’s moving from Springfield, Missouri to the big city of St Louis. You can reserve a room already. So mark your calendars and start saving pennies for the trip this summer.

Now we just have to watch for the inevitable tease as they release the speakers’ names one by one. They always have new and interesting voices on their schedule, so you can trust that it’s going to be good.

A new science video for Halloween!

Wednesday is Halloween! Yay! My favorite holiday!

Unfortunately, I’ve got a work engagement that’s going to tie me up for a couple of days, so no Halloween for me. Boo.

The good news, though, is that the work is playing with the gang at the Science Museum of Minnesota on a new exhibit! Yay!

The bad news is that I’ll have to neglect the blog for a while. Boo.

The good news is that I scheduled a new evo devo video for tomorrow! It’ll be available at 7am Central time, and you’ll be able to criticize it on YouTube while I’m watching the premiere, which I plan to do before getting in the car and driving to St Paul! Yay, I think?

The bad news is that there are no spiders in this video at all. Boo.

But there are cephalopods! Yay!

You say that like it’s a bad thing

There’s a surge in the spider population going on, and people are calling it an Arachnid Apocalypse.

It isn’t just your imagination. Scary sightings of larger-than-usual spiders are on the rise in Metro Vancouver this fall.

Pest control specialist Randy Bilesky has seen a 50 per cent increase in calls to his service this season over last.

“People panic … we get the phone call after someone has walked through a spider web,” said Bilesky. “They are sure it’s still in their hair, especially if it is one of the big hobo spiders.”

I prefer the term “Spider Renaissance”.

What next? Is everyone going to start complaining “Oooh, there are too many squid in the ocean” and “Ick, there are prokaryotes crawling around in my colon”?

Testy, condescending, oblivious

Oh, the pain: I sort of listened to this new interview of Jordan Peterson by Helen Lewis. I skipped around a bit, because there is only so much Peterson I can stomach, but I saw enough to get the gist.

He talks about lobsters at around 40 minutes. He hasn’t learned a thing. He’s still babbling about how lobster hierarchies refute the idea that much of human behavior, including hierarchies, can be socially constructed. That there is so much variation in animal behavior says that you can’t accept a single fundamental principle regulating behavior; that we use serotonin in our brains just means that there is an ancient signaling pathway that has been liberally repurposed by evolution multiple times.

He also uses his strawman argument that those damn social constructionists believe humans are infinitely malleable. I don’t believe that, but I also believe Peterson is full of shit.

He talks about gender roles, too, and how girls ought to be raised to look forward to making babies, and boys ought to be raised to have careers. Lewis mentions the obvious problem there: careers are the only thing you get paid for under capitalism. Peterson laughs condescendingly about an hour in.

How can you say something like that? It’s so cliched.

It’s not capitalism, for god’s sake. You have to invest into a child for 18 years before they have any economic utility. t’s a consequence of delayed economic utility. We don’t know to monetize it. It’s not a consequence of capitalism! It’s a consequence of the fact that humans have an 18 year dependency. How do you monetize that?

It’s not capitalism, he sneers, and then his defense of that claim is entirely about the “economic utility” of children and how difficult it is to monetize kids. That’s about the most capitalistic argument ever: he’s only able to see the world through the lens of capitalism. It was kind of amazing how little he’s able to examine his own premises.

Then, shortly after that he goes full-blown psychopath. He sees other people with different views as not fully human — as robots or NPCs who’ve been narrowly programmed by their ideology. It’s creepy how he dismisses Lewis.

I’m not hearing what you think. I’m hearing how you are able to represent the ideology you were taught. And it’s not that interesting because I don’t know anything about you. I can replace you with someone else who thinks the same way, and that means you’re not here. That’s what it means. It’s not pleasant. You’re not integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you’ve been taught, to synthesize something that’s genuine and surprising and engaging in a narrative sense as a consequence. That’s the pathology of ideological possession. It’s not good. And it’s not good that I know where you stand on things once I know a few things. It’s like, why have a conversation? I already know where you stand on things.

You know, I could say the same thing about Peterson fans: they’re ideologically obsessed and extraordinarily predictable. I’d say the same thing about Peterson himself — he’s a thoughtless ideologue.

He also says that climate change is probably happening, and that he’s got no opinion on it, but then he goes on to say he read 200 books on ecology and that climate change has been hyped, and that he really admires that fraud, Bjorn Lomborg.

The conversation turns to Count Dankula, that loon who trained a pug to give a Nazi salute. Peterson thinks that’s fine, because it was just a joke (oh, god, the “just a joke” excuse is so tiresome). Lewis disagrees.

I don’t fundamentally believe that it was a joke. I believe it was camouflaged as a joke, and it comes across as…

Peterson: Well, that’s exactly what you would believe if you were inclined to persecute comedians.

OK, I was done at that point. What a dishonest sleaze. Fuck him.

Why are people still interviewing that loon?