I guess I’m supposed to be happy

Minnesota, as a state, is happier than California?

I don’t quite trust these things. They always have to juggle a whole bunch of parameters to come up with a single composite score like “happiness,” and you can get any answer you want with the right weights. They mention a few inputs but don’t tell us how they manipulate them.

OK, they include weather, but it must be scaled way down for us to beat California.

True story: last week I checked the weather before I went on a walk, and the computer told me it was -3°. No problem, I thought, that was almost balmy. Unfortunately, the weather site was telling me the temperature in °F — my wife prefers Fahrenheit, while I think in Celsius — and that meant it was actually -20°C. I went on my walk, all bundled up, but 20 minutes later noticed that I couldn’t feel my toes.

But sure, Minnesota is much happier than California. At least we’re not in Lose-iana.

It’s a wrap

Portrait of the Fall 2024 semester

The grades for all of my classes, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and History of Evolutionary Thought, and Cell Biology lab, and Biological Communication II, have been submitted. I am done. This was not my favorite semester of the 50-some semesters I’ve taught here.

Now I’m getting ready for spring semester — or rather, I have been getting ready. I set up fly stocks way back in early November, I have to do one more generation, and then I set up all the flies for our first lab. Bonus: next semester, I have no classes on Fridays. Three day weekends every week! That might make up for all the grading I’ll have to do in the writing class I’ll be teaching.

Scientists as scoundrels

No scientist has ever looked at the state of science funding and thought it was great. The pressure is tremendous and the success rate for grants is dismal. But hey, it could get so much worse and probably will. The incoming administration is flagrantly anti-science.

Trump has been getting cozy with the Argentinan president, Javier Milei, and the two have been up to no good.

Last month, Milei pulled Argentina’s delegates out of negotiations at the United Nations COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where world leaders were discussing how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and pay for such efforts around the globe. The move came hours after he spoke with US president-elect Donald Trump, who has signalled that he will remove the United States from such negotiations when he takes office next month. Trump and Milei have expressed mutual admiration.

But guess what?

It has been one year since libertarian President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and the nation’s science is facing collapse, researchers say. Milei’s agenda to reduce the country’s deficit and lower inflation — which had topped 211% last year — has meant that, as his administration’s slogan says, “there is no money” for science or anything else.

“We are in a very, very critical situation,” says Jorge Geffner, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research in Retroviruses and AIDS (INBIRS) in Buenos Aires. He adds that the Innovation, Science and Technology Secretariat, once the country’s main science ministry but downgraded by Milei to a secretariat with less power, is working with a budget that is one-third lower than last year.

Argentinian scientists who are paid by the government have lost up to 30% of their income, Geffner says. (As of 2022, the government funded about 60% of research and development in Argentina, and the rest came from the private sector and international contributions.) As a result, the country is facing massive brain drain. At INBIRS, about half of its staff members are either considering finding jobs in other countries or already doing the paperwork, Geffner adds.

Milei does not hold scientists in high regard.

Milei has not minced words about his feelings towards scientists. Rather than having their research subsidized by the government, he said during a forum in September, “I invite them to go out into the market. Investigate, publish and see if people are interested or not, instead of hiding like scoundrels behind the coercive force of the state”.

Scientists aren’t going to be friends with Trump, the flamboyant idiot who would appoint RFK jr to run the NIH and Elon Musk to shred the economy and wants to shut down public education, so I think we can expect the situation for science in this country to get progressively worse. Other countries already have saturated populations of scientists, so if there were to be a reverse brain drain, I don’t know where we could go. Does New Zealand have room for a million expatriated American scientists? Canada? Germany? For American science to abruptly collapse would be a catastrophe for the whole world.

Surprise, the Earth is a globe

I hate to mention it again, but since I mentioned “The Final Experiment” before, I guess I should note that it has been concluded. On 14 December, observers in Antarctica watched the sun stay above the horizon for 24 hours, as predicted. Ho hum.

This was a stupid, attention-grubbing stunt. People have lived and worked in Antarctica for decades, so this phenomenon has been reported many times. It’s routine. The only novelty is that this evangelical pastor, Will Duffy, dredged up some of the dumbest people on the internet and spent a lot of money to get them to stand somewhere near the South Pole and look up. Some concede that what they saw doesn’t fit their expectations, while lots of others stayed home and closed their eyes. This “experiment” will accomplish nothing, other than to advertise an anti-abortion evangelical freak as somehow pro-science. Flat earth is being used as a tool for science-washing Christian nonsense.

GLADIIATOR

I feel like I need to apologize for whatever smug twit thought it was clever to put that “II” in the middle of “Gladiator”. Its appearance in the title card was, however, the last bit of wit in this entire movie, and was also representative of the botched, gimmicky plot of the sequel.

First, the historical background, even though it really doesn’t matter. In the early 200s CE, Caracalla, a Gallic soldier, was emperor of Rome for about 20 years; his brother, Geta, was briefly co-ruler before he was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard. Caracalla himself was also murdered by the Praetorian Guard, and was succeeded by Macrinus, the Praetorian prefect, who only ruled for about a year before he lost a battle near Antioch and got himself executed. There. That’s more history than you need, because this movie is going to jettison everything but the names and compress everything down to a couple of days one summer in Rome. Time has no meaning.

The gladiiator in the title is a soldier who is captured in the battle which led to Rome conquering Numidia…sometime around 200 CE. Wasn’t Numidia annexed by the Emperor Augustus, somewhat before then? No matter, this isn’t history. He’s hauled off to Rome as a slave, thrown into the arena, and kills a mangy monkey (I’m not belittling the accomplishment, it really is one hideous, terrifying baboon with huge fangs and a temper, so good on him.) The emperors, a pair of drooling psychopathic halfwits that I mentally labeled as Short Ed Sheeran and Tall Ed Sheeran, were impressed, as were some rebellious senators, as was his mom. It turns out that Gladiiator is the son of the gladiator from the first movie! It’s a hereditarian miracle!

Anyway, there are some more fights in the arena, including a spectacular naval battle. Tall Ed Sheeran gets murdered, and then Short Ed Sheeran gets murdered, and then, somehow, Gladiiator gets a legion to march on Rome, which is confronted by a Roman legion. The ending gets very confusing as Gladiiator is teleporting all over the place to wherever the plot finds convenient; also, Rome seems to be very tiny, as he ends up posing by the singular Gate of Rome, with the whole city laid out behind him, which is mostly empty except for one prominent feature, the Colosseum, of course.

In a climax fitting for a Marvel superhero movie, the cunning, scheming, clever primary bad guy gets on a horse and gallops to the space between the two legions, dismounts, and gets into a one-on-one swordfight with the monkey-killing gladiiator. It made no sense. Nothing in this movie makes sense. Time and space are meaningless. Murderous ridiculous clowns can rule the world, which is at least believable now in the 21st century.

I was not entertained.

Benjamin Dixon murders the Young Turks

Someone call the police, this was a brutal execution.

Actually, never mind. I never cared much for Cenk Uygur or Ana Kasparian, never subscribed to the Young Turks, gave them at best a little side-eye, so I’m not at all surprised at their steady drift from progressive liberal, sort of, to apologists for MAGA.

I won’t miss them. Maybe some real progressives will benefit as money shifts away from this annoying pair.

The journal Intelligence really needs to change its name

That’s a journal I would never trust — after all, they were responsible for publishing Richard Lynn’s hacky paper on the IQ of nations. Now here’s another example of a terrible racist paper from it. It’s an evolutionary psychology paper by Kanazawa, a terrible combination that ought not to ever pass peer review.

On the basis of his theory of the evolution of intelligence (Kanazawa, 2004), Kanazawa (2008) proposed that, during their evolutionary travels away from the relatively stable and hence predictable environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; i.e., the African savanna of the late Pleistocene), the ancestors of Eurasians encountered evolutionarily novel environments that selected for higher intelligence. Therefore, Kanazawa (2008) predicted higher average IQ scores in countries located farther away from the EEA. Kanazawa (2008) tested this hypothesis against data gathered by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006), who estimated so-called “national IQ-scores,” i.e., the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms. Kanazawa (2008) found a significant negative correlation between countries’ national IQs and their distance from three geographic locations in and around sub-Saharan Africa.

This is from a paper analyzing the problems of peer review, using Kanazawa’s paper as a case study. That evo-psych paper flew through peer review, with reviewers missing a number of deep problems.

We point to a number of indisputable issues that should have precluded publication of the paper as constituted at the time of review. First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait. This assumption contradicts the received view on evolutionary population genetics and the main theme of the book (Oppenheimer, 2004) that was cited by Kanazawa (2008) in support of the Out-of-Africa theory. Third, the study is based on the assumption that the IQ of current-day Australians, North Americans, and South Americans is representative of that of the genetically unrelated indigenous populations that inhabited these continents 10,000 years ago (Wicherts et al., 2010b). In related work by others who share Kanazawa’s (2008) views on the nature of race differences in IQ, the latter issue was dealt with by excluding countries with predominantly non-indigenous populations (Templer and Arikawa, 2006). Thus, although Wicherts et al. (2010b) raised additional issues that may the topic of debate (see below), these three problems are beyond dispute.

I am amused that Kanazawa’s methodology assumed that the Earth is flat and that all peoples ignored geographical obstacles, like mountains and oceans, to make a beeline to their modern location. I am horrified that anyone would use Lynn’s deeply racist and wrong paper to make any estimates of a population’s intelligence. I reject the whole notion of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence in the first place.

The authors propose some changes towards a more open peer review process, which sound good to me. My simpler solution is to simply throw out the whole goddamn journal of Intelligence, along with anyone who publishes in it.

Speaking of flat earth follies, I see that YouTube is in a tizzy because someone is doing something called “The Final Experiment” — a group of people are flying to Antarctica to witness the fact that there is a period where the sun never sets, which ought to be impossible if Antarctica is actually a ring of land surrounding the whole planet. It’s ridiculous. No, flat earthers will find a new excuse and will not be persuaded by a “final” experiment — it’s not as if they reached their beliefs by experiment and reason in the first place, or as if all the other evidence that the earth is roughly spherical were insufficient.

Can you imagine someone proposing a “final experiment” to “prove” that life on earth evolved? I can’t. I know the idiots who are creationists far too well to think that.

TODAY: Freethoughtbloggers discuss the problem of evil

Just in time for your Christmas shopping list!

It seems obvious today that people are operating on different principles for defining good and evil. Some people seem to believe that it’s virtuous to massacre Palestinian children, strangle homeless people on the subway, murder healthcare CEOs (or deprive people of health care), and oppress trans people. All those things would put you on my naughty list! What are the rules for ethics and morality anyway? Are there any?

I’m going to have to reorganize everything

One of the perks of my position is that every two years I get a shiny new computer. I got my new one installed this morning.

That’s my usual work station. I’ve got a Wild M3 on the left, a nice Leica next to it, then this laptop with dual monitors spilling out the front because there is a mercury arc lamp hidden behind it, and then a giant black box with a Raspberry PI we use for behavioral observations. This isn’t going to work. It’s nice to have all the tools in one place, but I guess the PI black box is going to have to be relocated.

Or I’m going to have to take over another lab! Nah, compact and accessible is the way to go.