Yeah, they planned to explode on landing. It’s a feature of the SpaceX launches–they guarantee a spectacular and photogenic explosion with every launch. Stay tuned for more fireworks!

We can skip past the familiar preamble where Ken Ham deplores the fact that Venter was an atheist who will be separated from God for eternity, and jump ahead to the point where Ham agrees with the science.

1:32 Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome and the researchers had unanimously declared there is only one race, the human race. Wow. only one. You know what? They were confirming the Bible’s history. Now, they didn’t say that. Of course, I’m saying that, but that’s what they were really doing. This was observational science. They obtained DNA from people groups all over the world, and they sequenced the human genome.
…
You know what should have happened at that stage? I’ll tell you what should have happened back then. Christian leaders all over the world and Christians should have jumped up and said, “Told you so.” See, if you believe the Bible, if pastors had have taught Genesis as history, Genesis 1:11, we would all know that we all go back to one man, one woman. That’s that’s the biblical history and it’s real history. And so therefore, there’s only one race biologically, which would mean from a perspective of biology, there’s no such thing as interracial marriage and no such thing either as biracial children or anything like that.

It’s very strange that all those Southern Baptists who fervently studied the Bible somehow came to a very different conclusion, that black people were a different and inferior race, and that miscegenation was a terrible evil. I guess the Bible wasn’t as clear as he thinks it is. The Southern Baptists have long lobbied for segregation, and they now tie that belief in the separation of races to their positions on transgender and gay issues. A few years ago, Republicans voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would have protected same-sex and interracial marriage. I guess they hadn’t read their Bibles.

I agree that everyone, whether they are Christian or not, should jump up and state their support for the science that shows all humans come from a common ancestor. But they should also realize that this very same science, the science that agrees with their biblical perspective, also says that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor — that humans are related to chimpanzees and iguanas and blobfish and insects and bacteria. It’s real history! It was determined by observational science, his imaginary category, therefore it must be true.

He will never accept that. His version of science is one that only allows confirmation of his prior beliefs, i.e. it isn’t science at all.

Then he launches into some dogmatic garbage straight from the Discovery Institute.

3:11 Here was his team sequencing DNA. And DNA is not just a molecule. It’s not just chemistry. We now know that DNA is the most complex information system, language system in the entire universe. Zillions of bits of information in the DNA of living things on this planet. And DNA has the information to make the code system to read the DNA. DNA is the software of life. There’s no question about it. Codes only come from an intelligence. Information can only come from information from an intelligence. DNA cries out in the beginning, God. But he was an atheist doing good science, observational science, sequencing the human genome, and that’s observational science. They admitted there’s only one race which confirms the Bible’s history.

DNA may be the software of life, but we have no cause to believe codes only come from an intelligence. Mice make baby mice without an advanced degree in bioinformatics; biology is a mindless exercise in chemistry and physics. And mice have roughly the same amount of information in their genomes as do human beings. DNA doesn’t cry out anything.

That strange pink blob is my right knee, adorned with the fading signatures of myself and the surgeon. It’s lumpy and a bit swollen, still recovering from the stabbings, marked by a pair of white tags. I’m now beginning to feel somewhat normal, 4 days after the operation.

At first, it was painful and sensitive — I couldn’t really walk on it. That’s been changing fast, though, and now I can stand on that leg without grimacing and saying obscenities, and I can get about with the aid of a walker fairly well. Getting up from a sitting position is terribly painful, so I’ve avoided sitting much, lounging about in bed, mostly. Today that avoidance ends, and I just have to work on sitting down and standing up and shuffling slowly about the house.

I have yet to master stairs. There are two steps to get into the house from outside, and I have to work on conquering them so that I then have full freedom to explore the universe, gingerly.

I am also signed up for several weeks of physical therapy, and after that, I expect to be hiking through the cobwebby wilderness once again.

All went well, I’m on hydrocodone for a couple of days, but the doctor did minimal hacking and my knee can bear my weight even now. We’ll have to see how I feel once the drugs wear off, but I anticipate a rapid recovery.

Wow, it’s hard to type while on narcotics…

First Dog on the Moon

I’ve been to New York several times, and found it wonderful. Has Mamdami made it even better?

The message that hits hardest is the conclusion.

Mayor Mamdani is proof that if your political representatives don’t fix stuff, strengthen your community and make people’s lives better it is simply and only because
THEY DO NOT WANT TO

Look at Mamdami. Look at Trump. Look at Mamdami. Look at Trump again. You ought to wonder what the President is doing.

We went over my post-op exercises. I practiced using crutches. I got coached on the warning signs — if I see yellow pus leaking out of the incision, or red streaks emanating from the knee, go to the emergency room immediately. Uh, duh. I also got instructed on the pre-op routine for today, which mainly involves not eating or drinking tonight, and washing the surgical area with a special soap.

I was also getting prepared for the worst. Best case: I get a simple debridement, and face about two weeks of recovery. Worst case: if there is a lot of repair work done, I’m looking at 6 to 12 weeks of recovery. There is no option to look forward to.

After that depressing experience, I went to the lab and fed all the spiders to cheer myself up. Then I grabbed my laptop and set it up near my bed, since I’ll be spending at least the next couple of days there. I may be glued to the computer for a while.

Commenter Ted Lawry pointed me at this Discovery Institute article, in which they accuse scientists of smugness. Their authoritative source is Andrew Klavan.

Klavan noticed something interesting about the speakers: the scientific atheist “spokesmen” share, almost to a man, what Meyer calls an “element of smugness in the way they communicate.” Klavan mentions Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan. Oh, there’s Lawrence Krauss, and many others. Dr. Meyer recounts a memorable debate he had with Krauss that illustrates the point.

It occurred me as I was watching this conversation… I bet you could turn the sound off on a video of any of the well-known scientific atheists and they would likely be identifiable by the smugness that radiates from them, by the manner of speaking not by the words. Again, this is without any sound. You could try the experiment yourself sometime. Meanwhile, watch and enjoy Klavan and Meyer:

First, in case you’ve never heard of Klavan, he’s an obscure conservative babbler on the dying Daily Wire The only time I’ve heard of him was on a video where a bunch of these Daily Wire writers were huddled up smoking cigars and bragging about how they never do the dishes or laundry because their wives do them for them. Inspiring.

Secondly, his accusation is more appropriately directed at the creationists. The scientists he is complaining about are confident, because they come equipped with a battery of evidence. The creationists are the cocky, arrogant ones: they’re the people making extravagant claims without an iota of evidence. So sure, watch one of the videos from our side, and you’ll notice that we’re all forthright and bold where it is warranted; the creationists are even more arrogant, and their sole source is their interpretation of the Bible.

I do wonder why anyone should give a damn about Klavan’s opinion of science, since he has no qualifications other than being a pompous loudmouth.

I finally tried taking a photo of one, but all I had was my iPhone, which isn’t great for these kinds of pictures. Next time, I’ll bring my Canon R8 with the 100mm macro lens…but then I won’t get any reading done!

Amid a glut of anti-LGBTQ+ laws passed by the state legislature over the past half-decade, many queer Texans have decided to pack up and move to greener, more supportive pastures. So many have chosen Seattle that the Pacific Northwest city is now considering declaring an emergency.

As first reported by the Seattle Gay News, the City of Seattle is close to declaring a state of civil emergency in response to LGBTQ+ refugees from red states moving there. That comes after Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission, an advisory committee that counsels local leaders on matters related to Seattle’s queer community, reportedly sent a letter last month asking the city council to make an emergency declaration. The commission said that the city needed “an effective and empathetic response” to protect a “rapid influx of 2SLGBTQIA+ persons seeking refuge in Seattle.”

I don’t have to ask “Why Seattle?” I know Seattle. But for those of you unfamiliar with the place, here’s the perspective of a trans woman:

For some ex-Texans, Seattle has become a haven. Victoria Scott, a trans woman and freelance writer, lived in Houston working as a programmer at NASA after college in 2018. After coming out as transgender, she said that she found both Houston and Texas hostile. Scott moved around and lived briefly in Reno, Nevada, before settling in Seattle with her wife at the end of 2023. In Seattle, Scott found the foundation she had long needed.

“It’s done more for my day-to-day lived experience and mental health as a trans woman than basically any other thing I’ve ever done,” Scott told Chron.

For her, Seattle was everything Houston wasn’t. (For one, it isn’t nearly as hot.) Scott appreciates the city’s relatively decent cost of living and protective state and local laws for LGBTQ+ residents. But Scott also said that there were more queer and trans people out and about in Seattle, noting that she could form physical communities in a way she couldn’t in Texas. She attributed that to Seattle’s long, vibrant queer history.

“Trans people here are normalized to a degree they’re not elsewhere,” Scott said. “I get culture shock visiting other places now because I return pretty suddenly to people staring or murmuring about me … Here, I genuinely feel like just another woman.”

I’m a little bit envious: Why not Minnesota? It’s also socially inviting, but I admit that it does have a few shortcomings. No ocean. No mountains. It gets a little bit chilly in the winter.

I guess I’d also put the Pacific Northwest in first place. But Minnesota is in second place.

Poor Texas. They’re losing a lot of intelligent, creative people in order to pander to MAGA dorks.

That’s something called the Athena Bowl, a treasure recovered from a buried hoard in Germany.

In 1868, soldiers from an Imperial Prussian Army regiment discovered a hoard of dozens of ancient silver artifacts while constructing a new shooting range near the city of Hildesheim in central Germany. The Hildesheim treasure included elaborate and expensive tableware, including the Athena bowl, that may have belonged to Publius Quinctilius Varus or another Roman military commander who fought against Germanic tribes in the first century.

Fortunately, it ended up in a museum. If I found it, I’d be proudly serving soup in it. In my neighborhood, though, all we ever dig up is the occasional fossil and worthless old rocks.

A few weeks ago, I saw a movie called Normal. It was a violent shoot-em-up set in a small Minnesota town named Normal, starring Bob Odenkirk as the new sheriff. I guess his new standard role is as a more humorous, laid-back John Wick. Anyway, the premise of the movie, which was rather unbelievable, is that this town was a quiet, secret storage place for vast sums of yakuza money. Ha ha, very likely. The new sheriff discovers the hoard of cash and gold, and hijinks ensue, hijinks that involve the citizens of the town shooting and blowing things up to protect their lucrative local industry.

It was entertaining, but not great, and nothing like the small town Minnesota I see. Except…

Today I went downtown to pay my home insurance bill at a local bank. This bank has always felt weird to me — there are never any clients inside, it’s got these gigantic high ceilings and very classy decor, and I only ever see one or two tellers at “work,” that is, doing nothing but sitting at their desks looking bored. Suddenly, the idea that this bank could be a front for yakuza treasure seemed a little more probable.

Then I discovered that the bill I was paying was not for 6 months coverage, but for one month. Eeep. This was way too high for me, or for most people in this little town, so now I’m thinking that the idea that we’re under the yakuza seems much more plausible.

Bob Odenkirk, come save us!

It’s part of an Apocalypse Early Warning Tracker. The idea is that if trouble is coming, you should look at what the rich people — you know, the ones who practice insider trading and have tentacles in the government — are doing.

The site isn’t your run-of-the-mill private plane tracker. The system pulls from publicly available aviation data, specifically ADS-B signals, which broadcast an aircraft’s position, speed, and altitude in real time. By tracking around 11,000 private and business jets and comparing the number airborne at any given moment against historical norms, the site assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. A normal day hovers at 1. A sudden spike, five standard deviations above the baseline, suggests some s—t is going down.

The alert level is at 1 right now. Good news: Elon Musk isn’t scrambling to get to his secret, skull-shaped lair right now.

rizona State University soft launched a web app earlier this month that allows anyone, for $5 per month, to create an apparently unlimited number of customized “learning modules” using artificial intelligence. The AI chatbot, called Atom, uses online instructional materials from ASU professors to create a course that’s tailored to the goals, interests and skill level of the user. After asking a handful of questions and processing for about five minutes, Atom debuts a personalized course that includes readings, quizzes and videos from a half dozen experts at ASU.

You might be wondering, as I was, about the quality of the “learning modules” produced by running a course through a buzzsaw and splicing fragments together. Apparently and unsurprisingly, it’s not good.

ASU literature professor Chris Hanlon was one of the first to raise awareness of ASU Atomic. Hanlon told 404 Media that no professors he’d spoken with had given their permission for this generative content.

“None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used,” posted Hanlon on Bluesky.

Hanlon said the course materials were pulled from Canvas, a course management system. Hanlon criticized the AI-generated clips as error-laden, jumbled, lacking context, and confused.

“Concerning the course itself, there’s no throughline I can see; none of the videos really speak to one another — it’s a mishmash, though the individual lessons that comprise it probably make a lot more sense in their original context,” said Hanlon.

Oh, great. We use Canvas here. I respect my fellow biology professors, but I don’t see how it would improve our courses to have a machine fuse us into a nightmarish agglomeration. But that’s what happens when you see education as a fungible collection of “modules”.

The initiative by ASU is called “Project Atomizer”. An atomizer is “a device for converting a substance, especially a perfume or medicine, to a fine spray.” That sounds like an apt description of the project.

You may be wondering who is responsible for this abomination. I think it’s safe to blame the president of the university, Michael Crow.

Not much exists publicly on Project Atomizer. The initiative was mentioned briefly in a February presentation by ASU President Michael Crow, part of a larger proposal to make AI the focus of the future: “current realities require current solutions,” according to the presentation.

Crow said in an interview last week with the Greater Phoenix Chamber that ASU has 50 AI tools, three of which are augmentative AI tools for students. Crow said he uses AI for “everything” in his daily life.

“[W]hen I’m driving to work, I use the Gemini tool. Basically, I’ll pick a subject that I don’t know enough about and I’ll get myself educated in like 22 minutes or 25 minutes,” said Crow. “I use it for basically quick analysis of really complicated things that I don’t have enough facts [for].”

Crow also revealed that he has used AI to write 20 white papers since November. He’s also used AI to create multiple architectural proposals: one for a site in Hawaii near the village of Javi, another for an addition to the West Valley campus in Phoenix.

Oh god. An administrator who thinks a subject is a collection of facts, who uses it to churn out papers, who uses it to design buildings…fuck me sideways.

@angus.bsky.social
Elder daughter just told me about the red button / blue button ethical dilemma that’s been going around, and | find it FASCINATING.
Short version: Everyone on earth has to press a button. If a majority presses the blue button, everyone lives. If a majority presses the red button, everyone who presses the biue button dies.
She told me about this, and my immediate response was “That’s not interesting at all. Obviously everyone just pushes the biue button.” And then she started explaining the red button folks’ arguments, and |realized that it’s a question about how you understand what it is to be a human in community.

Likewise, my first thought was to press the blue button. But then I thought that that would just give all the red button people what they wanted, and I’d end up dead while they could take all my stuff. But then I thought again, would I want to live in a world full of murderous bastards? And I was back to pushing the blue button.

You could cycle around and around this dilemma all day long. Entertaining, but I have better things to do.

This does have evolutionary implications. We don’t have buttons with global effects, but throughout our history we’ve had people meeting and having to choose between cooperating and expediently executing those who oppose us. I think in the long run, cooperation wins, but the problem with this thought experiment is that it compresses a billion incremental decisions into one final, immediate commitment, and that isn’t at all realistic.

Making videos is easy when you get inspired by looney-tunes creeps.

It was 1975, Christmastime. I was a first year student at a private liberal arts college in Indiana, where I had a free ride. Picture a typical 18 year old who has been singled out with privilege, a lucky white boy with a bright future in front of him.

My parents had bought me a ticket to fly home for Christmas — maybe they missed me, too. I happily got on the plane to head home, when my luck ran out. Seattle was thoroughly fogged in, a problem that cropped up now and then, but in 1975, the fog was particularly thick, and it would end up closing SeaTac for about a week.

We landed at O’Hare, and my connecting flight was cancelled. That wasn’t so bad, I recall staying up all night flying paper airplanes in the vast empty spaces in the airport. The next day was mostly tiresome — the airline made us reboard a plane and sit there, just in case our destination was cleared, which it wasn’t. We finally disembarked. You may not be used to this, but in the 1970s the airlines were obligated to take care of their passengers, and we got put up in hotels for free, and they handed out meal vouchers that we could use at any restaurant, not just the ones in the airport. I was eating luxurious meals at no cost to myself.

The next day they tried something different: we boarded the plane, we sat for a few hours, and then they finally took off, aiming for Seattle, but when we got closer, the pilot concluded that we couldn’t safely land at our destination, so we were re-routed to San Francisco. We all got more free hotel reservations and fistfuls of meal vouchers, so we got to spend a couple of days in SF at the airline’s expense. I was put up in a hotel near the City Lights bookstore, so every day was an adventure.

I know, this sounds like a sweet deal. Where’s the regret?

There was one brief moment that haunts me. I left my hotel for a walk, when I heard a commotion behind me, from a group of about a dozen people who were clustered around something on the sidewalk, jeering and laughing. I had to push through and see…

An old woman, naked, shuffling around in a circle around her discarded clothes, looking uncomprehendingly at the crowd pointing at her. She was filthy; what struck me the most was that her feet were black and caked with dirt, and her toenails were long and twisted like corkscrews. She may have been drunk, or mentally ill, or just the victim of poverty. I was horrified by her condition and the taunting of the bystanders. This poor woman — I wondered how she was brought so low, did she have a family, were there moments of beauty and joy in her life that we can’t see here?

So what did I do? Here’s the regret.

I walked away.

I’ve felt terrible about that ever since. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering what I could have, should have done. Whenever I wonder whether I’m actually a good person (as we all do) this is the moment rises up in my memory. I’ve had people tell me I’m a good person, and I hesitate to respond, because all I can think of are those long blackened toenails. It’s a good thing I’m an atheist, because I can imagine St Peter pointing a bony damning digit at this entry in the book of my life, or Anubis tut-tutting at the imbalance in his scales, and either of them throwing me into a pit. I know I will never shed this feeling of guilt.

Now I write it down, because I should be judged for my behavior.

It’s been over 50 years. I will not forget that woman, or my moment of neglect. When I pass by a homeless person, I’ll throw a few dollars into their hat, but that will never be enough.

As concerns mount over artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into society, tech companies are increasingly turning to faith leaders for guidance on how to shape the technology — a surprising about-face on Silicon Valley’s longstanding skepticism of organized religion.

Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

I don’t think Anthropic and OpenAI have anything to bring to the roundtable, but they they ignorantly assume that religions have the key to moral behavior, all evidence to the contrary.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. But the leaders of the world’s religions, with billions of followers globally, have the “expertise of shepherding people’s moral safety,” she reasoned. Faith leaders ought to have a voice, Shields said.

She “reasoned.” I don’t think so. Those are the words of someone who has swallowed the propaganda that religions have always generated. Yeah, right, let’s turn to these guys for lessons in morality.

My wife, who works at an assisted living facility in town, just got home and told me a sad story of a resident whose grown kids did not bother to call her today.

So I’m here to remind you to get off your goddamn butt and call your mom. Now.

One of the prime sources of garbage is religion. Take a young, naive brain and stuff it with lies and nonsense, and it produces even more nonsense, which we then feed to the next generation, and it gets worse and worse until you’ve got a population of gibbering slugs who can’t get anything right. We’ve got people who’ve been primed with a steady diet of bad Bible interpretations who struggle to analyze even the simplest phenomena.

Case in point: Perry Stone, a Pentecostal evangelist with a surprising number of followers for someone who is so thick. He has juggled together fantasies about the Rapture and UFOs to build an elaborate edifice of weird conclusions, none supported by any evidence.

I’m not going to go into great detail, but there were a large number of pastors that had been invited to go to a certain state to hear some men in the United States government and others share with them a concern that they had, said Stone, who did not identify his source in his April 27 YouTube video, but claimed the person has a great church.

Stone, whose YouTube channel has approximately 925,000 subscribers, said his friend told him that some of those in the meeting were telling us as pastors, ‘You need to prepare your people, and you need to get ready to answer them for what you’re about to hear being released.’

And some of it has to do with crafts that have been discovered that are not allegedly a part of our planet, and the materials they’re made of are not a part of our planet. Very strange, reptilian-looking creatures and other things that almost sound like something out of a sci-fi movie or an [H.G. Wells] book, he added.

Groovy. It’s a real mish-mash of bad sci-fi movies and bad religion fermenting in that man’s brain. The problem here is that the foundations of his reasoning are all garbage.

Stone went on to place the extraterrestrial phenomenon within the framework of his dispensational premillennial eschatology that features belief in a pre-tribulational rapture, an Islamic Antichrist and a third Jewish temple purified by red heifers.

Stop right there, I would like to get off this train to crazytown. He goes much much further, though, and starts ladling the right-wing politics and racism on top of his already rancid trash salad.

Stone claimed the officials in the supposed meeting warned the pastors that disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrial existence will cause some Christians to question their faith and some non-believers to seek out pastors for an explanation.

Stone speculated that government fabrications regarding an alien invasion will eventually be used to explain away the rapture, attributing the theory to his son, Jonathan, who last year tweeted about former President Barack Obama being an advanced humanoid AI who used questions over his birthplace to hide that there was never any birth certificate at all.

This all supports my contention that these people have normal, healthy brains, but that their inputs are all garbled bullshit. It’s a real shame.

He was called to debate by this anonymous fellow, 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r, who coughed up the $10K for the privilege of telling Eliezer Yudkowski to stop making extravagant claims and stop threatening AI researchers with doom.

It is an utterly ridiculous debate between two clowns. Yudkowski wants to claim that research on AI is an existential threat to humanity (I think that’s silly, except in the sense that it is a waste of resources), while 47fucb4r8curb4fc8f8r4bfic8r is an LLM researcher who wants to grandstand and claim that Yudkowski is an existential threat to him, personally. I can’t take either of them seriously.

What I have learned is that if I want to profit from future debates, I need to invest in goofy hats.

*OK, Ray Comfort once sent me a fruit basket, but that was it. It was memorable because it was such an exception.

A scientist has been denied access to his lab…because he supported his Chinese students.

A faculty member at Indiana University (IU), who has sharply criticized the government’s recent prosecution of several Chinese scientists accused of smuggling biological materials into the United States, has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders.

IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian’s attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported. Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes’ lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.

Oh no, never criticize the US government.

This sounds like overreach by government agents trying desperately to find excuses to deport Chinese scientists, and taking out an American scientist as collateral damage. If I had foreign students, I would defend them without question, but apparently that will get you shut down in America.

I would love to know the rationale for excluding the PI from the lab, even if his post-docs were guilty of importing nefarious plants. Do they suspect him of plotting to attack the US from his lab in Indiana with evil weeds from China?

Interesting touch: the chair of Innes department is Armin Moczek, an eco-evo-devo guy I know of. He’s going to be watering Innes’ plants while he’s locked out.