Elon Musk really is an unpleasant jerk

He’s still stewing over his unused plan to rescue those kids stranded in a cave in Thailand, and he’s still accusing one of the guys who led the successful rescue of being a pedophile. Buzzfeed asked him for evidence of his accusation, and hoo boy, he really quadrupled down. His evidence that Unsworth is a pedophile? He’s a white guy who lives in Thailand, therefore…

Buzzfeed contacted the woman with whom he is in a long-term relationship. Just the simple fact of her existence seems to confound Musk’s claim.

BuzzFeed News also spoke with Woranan Ratrawiphukkun, a Thai woman who is Unsworth’s longtime girlfriend. She said she had been with Unsworth for more than seven years and has posted numerous photos about their relationship on social media dating back several years. Unsworth, she added, spends part of the year in Thailand and part of the time in the UK.

Ratrawiphukkun, who said she is 40, declined to comment on Musk’s allegations against Unsworth, and referred a reporter to his lawyers.

40? I guess the window of time for pedophilia can be stretched quite a bit. I suppose you could call me a hebephile, at least, since my wife is 6 months younger than I am.

Update on the spider soap opera (no photos)

Yeesh, but a lot of people send me piteous complaints if I post a photo of my little spider friends, so from now on I’ll either confine them below the fold, or as in this case, not have any photographs at all. I still want to give an occasional status, though.

So my tiny colony currently consists of four females and one male spider.

As I last mentioned, Sara is expecting — she was impregnated by some unknown wild male before I brought her into the lab. She’s got a voracious appetite and has sucked two crickets dry in the last 5 days.

Amanda has also been eating well. Last time, I introduced her to our one male, Harry, who was not at all subtle and jumped right on her. She didn’t seem to mind, since Harry survived the encounter.

Since Harry was so eager, I moved him to Emma‘s vial. He’s still there, still alive, but kind of curled up and looking exhausted. Emma is looking great, and was smacking her chelicerae over a fresh cricket corpse.

Xena — poor Xena, I’ve been worried about her. She doesn’t eat. There’s a juicy cricket wandering about in her vial, taunting her, and she does nothing. But today Xena made an egg sac! I guess she had her priorities.

The Nameless Swarm of spiderlings seem to be doing well. I throw a few fruit flies into their dish, and a few hours later they’re all dead. I’m going to have to clean up the charnel chaos of their home tomorrow — it’s littered with the dessicated husks of their victims. The babies are so cute.

So that’s 5 adults and three egg sacs in less than two weeks, and an uncountable horde of spiderlings. That’s a pretty good volume of animals spawned fairly quickly, which is good news for my interest in getting embryos.

I’m optimistic that I’ll have a reliably propagating colony soon, if mortality isn’t too high among the spiderlings (I’ve read that there is a lot of death to come, but there are so many I’m hoping I’ll get plenty surviving to adulthood).

I’m impressed at how easy these are to raise, so far. You ought to try it!

Owning the libs, a tale in three acts

Nike is coopting Colin Kaepernick’s protest by featuring him in an ad. It makes me slightly queasy to see Big Capitalism buying the face of a cause, but I’m not going to argue about that. Instead, the Trumpsters are losing their shit. They’re throwing away or setting their Nike clothing and shoes on fire in protest.

Which is fine — protesting is a great old tradition, they should publicly protest ideas they oppose. Kinda like how Kaepernick has been doing. So they’re protesting a guy protesting for protesting by protesting, and the irony is escaping them, as is the fact that destroying a product you’ve already purchased isn’t exactly doing Nike any harm.

It’s just stupid.

How stupid? Well, this one guy made it even stupider.

He announces his intent to burn his shoes. There’s some foreshadowing about what is to come here.

He asks everyone to retweet his principled act of bravery. OK! Happy to oblige! Uh, guy, shouldn’t you take the shoes off before you set them on fire?

Then, in the third act, the predictable outcome. You can guess where this is going. I’m putting this photo below the fold, because it is a bit grisly. He’s in the hospital now.

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The movie this week is…BlacKkKlansman

First, though, a little advertisement: starting this weekend, the Morris Theatre is holding the Prairie Light Film Festival, a whole week with a rotating roster of good movies, movies I’ve wanted to see, but had low expectations that they’d ever play in small town rural Minnesota. It’s a small, mostly white and conservative town, and we’ve long had this single screen movie theater that has had to play it safe with their choices if they want to be profitable, and that means we get movies that will appeal to college students or the general community, without a lot of risk-taking. For instance, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was the sole movie being shown for about a month a few years ago. Enough said.

So now we’ve got this crazy wild festival coming up, and we’ve got a second screen, so finally the theater can show movies with narrower appeal, like BlacKkKlansman. Once upon a time, I would have estimated the chance of a Spike Lee film being shown in Morris as negligible — not because the theater management wouldn’t have liked to, but because they needed movies with broad appeal to the Morris audience. But now they can, and I am so happy.

BlacKkKlansman is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Right at the top of my list. Great acting, amazing story, strong and relevant theme, beautifully structured. I had no idea how they were going to pull of the central conceit of the story — a black man joins the KKK — but the way it was done, that there were two undercover cops using the same name, and it was the white guy, Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, who would appear at Klan meetings, while the black guy, John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, would manage everything over the phone, worked well. It also worked well because it gave both Flip and Ron opportunities to grow in the roles they were playing. Driver was great as a Jew who realizes that this is his battle, too.

But I have to say something about the end of the movie. It was the most powerful gut punch I’ve ever experienced at a movie. So below the fold is a kind of a spoiler — I’m not going to give away any details of the plot, but I am going to say a few things about the structure of the ending.

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Don’t do this

I am not deep in the lore of statistics, but even I find this appalling.

No, really? And this is published in Nature, and not one reviewer threw a flag on the play? I had to double-check.

Yep, there it is. Wow. Why even bother with statistics if you’re just going to do the experiment until you get the answer you want?

Here, go read this: A Tutorial on Hunting Statistical Significance by Chasing N.

Brooks Mythicists have a point

Well, now I’m confused. It turns out that the historicity of the Bush years can be reasonably called into question.

Of course as every high-school student knows, almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits during that period were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity — the early 21st century’s Elite media’s last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes. And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the “fuckingblogs”.

In particular, one figure stands out as implausible: David Brooks.

And as the original events have been sifted and re-sifted by popular culture, fan fiction and hermeneutics, the academic world has more-or-less evenly divided itself into two, irreconcilable orthodoxies — the Historical Brooks versus the Fictional Brooks — each of which finds strong support for its own theory in the literature itself.

Based on the radically divergent accounts of writings attributed to him during a single decade, roughly half of all professional media historians — The Historicals — subscribe to theory that “David Brooks” in an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people. The other half — The Fictionals — maintain that since so much of what he was alleged to have written was so obviously false and absurd, “David Brooks” had to be a literary contrivance: something analogous to Poe’s nameless recounter of “The Telltale Heart” or Greta Van Sustern — a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story.

Both sides have good arguments.

Obviously, (the Historicals conclude) like “Alan Smithee” or “Tom Freed Man”, “David Brooks” must have been some sort of collective pen-name behind which dregs of the Punditry Guild could shout all kinds of shameful craziness while avoiding the professional consequences of saying remarkably stupid thing in public.

But (the Fictionals rejoin very effectively) it is the very ludicrousness of “David Brooks”‘s “opinions” which argue most strongly against it being the name — or pseudonym — of any real person or persons. Consider that, in order to make the argument that the United States government is incapable of competently operating a national health-care system with mandates, “David Brooks” simply ignores the fact that the United States government of that era was already operating a very efficient and beloved national health-care system (with mandates!) which was known as Medicare and, at the time, had over 49 million beneficiaries.

I don’t know how to decide. This might help: a fellow atheist and trained historian, Eddie Marcus, contacted me and offered to explain how historians make decisions about the historicity of a different weird, unbelievable person, Jesus. I’m willing to listen — it might help me make up my mind about this bizarre “David Brooks” character — so we’re doing a hangout on Wednesday at 7am Central time, or 8pm Perth time (the hour is a compromise to find a reasonable time when both of us are awake). I’d say “Join us”, but I think that’s only going to reasonably apply to Australians and Asians. So, “Join us, Australians! Half of us will be speaking English properly!” The rest of you can tune in after it’s all over.