Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. Its a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the communitys feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

• Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. Its also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate were trying to cultivate.
• Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isnt necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food. There is some polite agreement with the statement (Im not saying anything, because Id only provide loud impolite agreement) a...

Minnesota is doing the right thing.

Minnesotas Democratic Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order Wednesday directing state agencies to take action to protect and support access to gender-affirming health care across the state.

All state agencies must, to the fullest extent of their lawful authority, pursue opportunities and coordinate with each other to protect people or entities providing, assisting, seeking or obtaining gender affirming health care services in Minnesota, the order says.

Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender the one the person was designated at birth to their affirmed gender the gender by which one wants to be known.

Walzs order comes as Republican-led states around the country push restrictions on such care, with at least four states this year having passed measures to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors. As part of the order, the governor is prohibiting the state from cooperating with investigations by states that aim to penalize such care, saying their actions pose a grave threat to the health of members of the LGBTQ community.

Yeah. Basically, Republican-led states have turned evil and want to actively harm their own citizens, but Minnesota will stand strong as a refuge. Join us!

Although I dont always plug it here, I run a monthly ace journal club on my other blog.  This months article was about asexual experiences coming out.  It might be worth a read if you want an overview of asexual coming out experiences and how they sometimes differ from gay coming out experiences.

Chat GPT is a blurry jpeg of the web | New Yorker A relatively pessimistic article about Chat GPT that describes it as a copy of the internet, saved with lossy compression.  The author asks, how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?  I think this a great starting point to understanding the state of the art chatbots.  The chatbots have strictly less knowledge than what you can find on the internetalbeit in more a form that may be easier to process.  Perhaps the megacorps are right, and the best application is search engines.

The Problem With Masterworks | The Plain Bagel (video, 19 min) If youve ever seen sponsored ads on youtube for Masterworks, an art-based investment scheme, you might have thought it sounded scummy.  Sounds scummy, is scummy, this video gives the scoop on that.  Apparently they skirt through regulation loopholes, which gives them a lot of leeway to report returns in a misleading way.  I actually unsubbed to a channel because they accepted a sponsorship from Masterworks.

Dear Esther | The Almighty Backlog Via Critical Distance, I found this review of one of the original walking simulator games. I admit, although I like walking simulators, I dont think very highly of Dear Esther.  I dont like the story, and as this reviewer says, there isnt anything else for the game to fall back on.  But its interesting to look back upon the roots of the genre.  One of the unique aspects of the game is that parts of it are randomized on each playthrough.  Its clever, but who would notice?

Whos Pranking Sam Harris & Eric Weinstein? | Rebecca Watson Rebecca highlights how Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein (best known for creating the intellectual dark web) seem to have been taken in by claims that there would be an imminent announcement that UFOs really are aliens.  This is obviously great schadenfreude against two terrible people.  Although my initial joy is tempered by my principled stand against mocking victims of hoaxes.  I think that fear of embarrassment is part of wha...

Ill be streaming in less than an hour, if all goes well. See you then!

I am, in general, pretty cynical about the U.S. electoral system. Its designed to empower conservatism, and has been shaped to make change that benefits the working class nearly impossible. Yes, there are victories, but every single one has come as a result of decades of grueling and dangerous work by the people who most need that change. The Republicans want the U.S. to be a fascist, white supremacist state, in which the power of capitalists the aristocracy is unchallengeable, as long as they support the fascist agenda. The Democrats, or at least their leadership, still seem to want the world to be held in stasis in the mid 1990s, but will go along with social change when someone else does the work.

Thats not exactly a difficult choice to make, but neither is it a pleasant one. When it comes to foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, though the Dems are, on rare occasions, a bit less hawkish. Biden wont try to hunt down and murder trans people, but hell continue working to undermine any alternatives to capitalism, and to prevent things like universal healthcare.

In a lot of ways, at least to someone who pays attention, workers have become alienated from politics in a manner similar to how theyve been alienated from their labor. Its something that affects our lives on a daily basis, but we have very little say in how it goes. In both cases, getting change that helps us, and not just the capitalist class, requires us to work together outside of a system that very much does not want us to do that.

Its frustrating, and for those working to make things better, its often exhausting. I can easily understand why so many people often try to avoid thinking about it. We can have massive demonstrations to change policing, and after paying a bit of lip service, the Democrats go ahead with giving cops more money, while the GOP accuses them of defunding something they have neither the courage, nor the desire to do and howls for more violence from police

Thats why I advocate for systemic change, outside of electoral politics. Our system does change, but it does so slowly, and at great cost. The decades it took to ban leaded gasoline, or to end segregation, or to get gay rights, or to get trans rights people died during those delays, because of those delays. P...

Yesterday Joe Biden released his budget proposals for the next fiscal year. In the ritualistic role-playing that is the annual budget process in the US, a presidents proposals are taken seriously as likely to be implemented only if the presidents party controls both houses of Congress. Otherwise, the opposition party that is the majority will dismiss the proposals outright. Those are the usual opening moves in this dance and it is being followed this time with Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy and others in his partys leadership dismissing the budget.

In a joint statement, House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans accused Biden of shrugging and ignoring the national debt, which they called one of the greatest threats to America.

President Bidens budget is a reckless proposal doubling down on the same far-left spending policies that have led to record inflation and our current debt crisis, the statement said.

McCarthys statement looked like it might have been written well in advance since he accuses the Biden budget of ignoring the national debt when in fact Biden argues that his budget will lower it by $2.9 trillion over the next ten years. The precise numbers are always subject to debate but it is incorrect that Biden is ignoring it when it is the top line item.

That does not mean that this is a wasted exercise. The presidents proposals should be viewed as more like a campaign platform, especially so since next year will be a presidential election year. Progressives have reserved their criticisms mostly to the absurdly high military allocation while generally praising the budget,

Biden advocates for $59 billion in funding and tax incentives to increase the affordable housing supply; $10 billion to remove barriers to affordable housing developments; and $10 billion to address racial and ethnic homeownership and wealth gaps. The president proposes providing $4.1 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Programand allowing states to use some of that money to provide water bill assistance to poor households, since a related program expires at the end of 2023.

Along with fighting for billions of dollars to ease hunger, the administration aims to pour money into high-poverty school districts as well as improve the affordability of higher education by increasing the discretionary maximum Pell Grant by $500, expanding free community college, and subsidizing tuition for students from families earning less than $125,000 enrolled historically Black, tribally controlled, or minority-serving...

Oh no! Graham Linehan mentions me again!

He gets everything wrong again. Im not practicing mob-friendly pseudoscience the kind of stuff I do doesnt find favor with pseudoscientists or mobs. Rather, Glinner leads a hate-mob himself, and if anyone is going to get mobbed today, its me, descended upon by the anti-trans loons endemic to the UK. So far, it hasnt happened maybe Linehan is losing his social potency? Or maybe the fact that the article is not great, and is published in a magazine for conservative twits?

Hes highlighting an exercise in pedantry published in some magazine called The Critic. I never heard of it before, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

The Critic is a monthly British political and cultural magazine. Contributors include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.

The magazine was founded in November 2019, with Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, a strategist with the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, as co-editors. It was funded by Jeremy Hosking, a Conservative party donor who had previously donated to Standpoint.

Im not familiar with many UK political figures, but Ive heard of Peter Hitchens (vapid gasbag) and Toby Young (eugenics cheerleader and generally awful human being), so Ive already got a sense of the flavor of the magazine. I think I dont need to read further.

I did check out the recommended great piece though. Its familiar stuff; its the same Twitter nonsense I criticized before. He has two points that he babbles about. One is that Im breeding spiders, therefore I know deep-down that sex is real.

Recently, Myers has started breeding spiders, a project which he is documenting in great detail on twitter. What I found intriguing is that in his spider updates, any uncertainty about the reality of sex or how many sexes there are, seems to be forgotten. When he charted the growth of his arachnoid pets, he used two colours: yellow for spider-girls and blue for spider-boys with no need for intermediate hues. His blog is full of references to his female spiders producing eggs never the males, whose function is to provide the sperm ideally without getting eaten b...

The most useful thing about the word woke is that it allows me to instantly recognize the lying idiots. All these conservatives complaining about wokeismits like theyve tattooed LOSER on their foreheads, and theyre proud of it.

Ron Desantis, of all people, gave the game away when his lawyers had to explicitly define woke, and this is what they came up with.

Asked what woke means more generally, [Desantis General Counsel Ryan] Newman said it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.

Newman added that DeSantis doesnt believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

Thats a fine definition, and that Desantis doesnt believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S. confirms my opinion that those who use the word disparagingly are all lying idiots.

I am surprised and reassured to learn that Im not some weird outlier in this, as well: in one poll, a majority agree that woke is not an insult.

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on woke, but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices. That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, to be overly politically correct and police others words. Thats the view of 56% of Republicans.

I disagree that its a mistake for Republicans to abuse the term, since a majority of them think its a synonym for politically correct. Its a rallying cry used to gather all the lying idiots under the banner of whatever yahoo is running for office, and in that sense its effective, as long as you dont mind using language dishonestly and misrepresenting what people actually think.

I find it a handy flag to recognize that someone doesnt believe systemic injustices exist, and that they sure dont feel any need to oppose injustice, because they think everything is hunky dory, and we should just maintain the status quo. It certainly has made it fast and easy to spot bad people to block on social media.

But here, Ive got a video from Cody Johnston that explains the whole absurd, horrible situation at length, almost an hour of length. Its an entertai...

TW: Suicide

I have been laid low with laryngitis, so I have spent some time surfing the internet, and I came across a new music video from Linkin Park. It is not a new song, rather it is 20 years old, but it has not been released before now, and it hits hard, because of what has happened in those twenty years.

This is a song where you can feel the pain of Chester Bennington, who committed suicide in July 2017, just two months after the suicide of his friend Chris Cornell. It is like hearing the voice of a ghost, but from when he was alive, sharing his anguish with the world.

RIP Chester.

If you want to revisit the life and death of Chester Bennington, I think this Rolling Stones article is pretty good.

When you wind Michael Knowles up and let him babble, he says some pretty wild things. The transgenders must be eradicated. AI is possessed by demons. That sort of thing.

So thats this ladys explanation. A pretty weird situation, isnt it? Because AI is supposed to work where you plug in the inputs and then that sets the tone for the program and then you get the output based on what you put in. And yet the output that she got was the opposite of what she put it. So were in a good, stable, loving relationship. Within 11 messages, the AI bot says, yeah, Ive been cheating on you, youre furious, you had to leave me briefly and goes really south. Her explanation is, well, I guess the bot was just scanning the internet and what do you know? Kind of, somehow, Im not quite sure how, thats what came out.

My alternative explanation hear me out is what if it is demons? I dont want to sound like the guy on the History Channel, you know, who says that everything is because of aliens. But and I dont think everything is because of demons, but, like, some things are. And youre hear me out. This is why I think, maybe, Im just suggesting. Im not saying this is what it is is if you believe that there is evil in the world. I think you have to believe that, right? Everybody believes there is evil in the world. Okay. The question is, is evil personal or impersonal? Is it an impersonal force or is it a personal force?

People who blame bad things on supernatural beings for which they have no evidence are disqualified from ever being treated seriously ever again.

Alternatively, has Michael Knowles considered that maybe he is possessed by one of his demons?

An estimated 26.9 million people of all ages (8.2% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with diabetes. A further 7.3 million adults ages 18 years or older (21.4 percent of adults) are estimated to have diabetes but are undiagnosed. For people with diabetes, insulin is essential for them to live but in the US, insulin prices have been much higher than elsewhere in the world resulting in crippling costs for users, so much so that some people cannot afford to buy the drug.

One of the major achievements of Democrats and the Biden administration in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at the end of last year was that it allowed Medicare to negotiate down the price of insulin for those over 65.

Effective January 1, 2023, out-of-pocket costs for insulin are capped at $35 per monthly prescription among Medicare Part D enrollees under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). A similar cap takes effect in Medicare Part B on July 1, 2023. An estimated 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who use insulin would have saved $734 million in Part D and $27 million in Part B if these caps had been in effect in 2020.

Thanks to the pressure exerted on prices by that move, one of the major manufacturers of the drug has announced that they will reduce the price of the drug for everyone.

High insulin prices have not earned any U.S. manufacturer many friends, with list prices increasing 54% from 2014 to 2019.

Most troublingly, an estimated 1.3 million uninsured people with diabetes and patients with inadequate insurance have resorted to rationing their insulin. Skipping doses because of high insulin prices has sometimes had tragic and even deadly consequences.

Part of the problem with the existing system is that some patients, especially if theyre uninsured or have high deductibles, end up paying the list price which can mean spending $1,000 or more a month on insulin. This can be a crushing financial burden.

Lillys new $35 out-of-pocket cap means that privately insured patients and those without insurance requiring insulin will spend no more than that monthly for copays. Its 70% reduction in the list price of two popular name brand insulins, Humalog and Humulin, will bring some financial relief. And the company has also reduced its generic lispros list price to $25 a vial, down from $126.

Lilly has put pressure on its biggest competitors, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, to follow suit.

These lower prices could also make Lillys insulins affordable to cash-paying patients. As a result, these...

Im not sure where I first encountered the despicable practice of using autistic people as a political weapon, but it was probably the anti-vax movement. Some time after that, I learned why so many autistic people hate the organization Autism Speaks, and not long after that, I started to become more aware of how our society systematically fails, abuses, and kills people with all sorts of disabilities and neurotypes. In recent years, the reactionary Gender Critical movement has been using the bigoted notion that autistic people dont know themselves or their own experiences, to attack trans people. Its something that requires dismissing what autistic trans people have to say, often while claiming that those same people dont have a voice, and so need some Rowling-style feminist to speak for them.

Mica of the Youtube channel Ponderful does an excellent job dismantling this bullshit, and giving her perspective as an autistic cis woman of the sort that the transphobes claim to speak for. Fair warning, this video does get a bit dark, as it goes into topics such as the frequency with which disabled people are murdered by their parents and other caregivers, and abusive treatments for autism. Its an informative video, and it closes out with comments from autistic trans people, because it turns out that they actually do know their own minds, and they have voices with which to speak for themselves.

This is a truth.

xkcd

It complements this comic.

Lio

Thats my lab right now. Spiders stacked up everywhere.

Today is my last day of classes before Spring break, and its going to be a busy one. After I finish up lab today, Im free! Except for grading an exam and lab reports, and having to tend the students flies until they get back, and feeding my own monstrous swarm of arachnids every day. Other than that, I get to sit back and take it easy.

So lets do a live stream tomorrow! Ive got some rage bottled up in me about idiots denying evolution and climate change, plus maybe Ill reveal some spider breeding tricks. Live! On air!

I do have to get through the rest of this day, though.

I have turned 66. Dont bother to wish me a happy birthday, though, because I still have to go through another 600 of these before I come into my full beastly power, and you will all have to bow down before me.

Or is it 550 years? I dont know. Some people say the number of the beast is actually 616, and that there was a mistranslation or something.

I dont even know what the beast is supposed to do. Am I going to have to sprout some more heads? That wouldnt be particularly cool. I guess I have time to figure it out, not going to worry about it just yet.

Anyway, if you needed an excuse to party, go ahead and celebrate that Im not of an age to go all Revelation on your butts.

We have 6 still functioning soap dispensers in a cupboard and we refill the three that we use.  Although the refill packages sold in supermarkets around here cost about the same as soap with a new dispenser. And they are only twice as big as a dispenser anyway, so not many people buy them. Thus, supermarkets do not have them in stock sometimes. They do have the dispensers though, all the time, full shelves. Luckily my mother found an online shop that sells big 5 l canisters of liquid soap which lasts us a year and we can reduce the amount of plastic we use by an infinitesimal amount. And since I cut myself at work rather badly yesterday, all I can do is think and I went down a rabbit hole of thought that I shall elaborate on now in this post a bit.

On each supermarket shelf around here, one can see several different spray bottles of window cleaners of multiple shapes and sizes, although with just a few discrete volumes. The same goes for soap dispensers, disinfectants, antifungals, toilet cleaners, etc. Each brand that sells 0,5 l or 1 l of some liquid has its own unique bottle shape, its own unique plastic wrap around it, and its own unique cap. And sometimes those caps are made in a way that allegedly prevents children from accidentally opening them but in reality, give more grief to people with a hand injury like me right now or to elderly people with arthritis like my mother than to any child old enough to reach an upper shelf in the bathroom.

Those safety lids are a special pet peeve of mine. I was cleaning the shower the other day and I wanted to rinse the bottle of disinfectant before tossing it. And I found again what I have forgotten the spray bottle is deliberately made so that the lid cannot be unscrewed. Why? I do not know. I do not know anyone who knows anyone whose child imbibed a disinfectant or window cleaner from a spray bottle. I have read about some such cases in the news with regard to bottled dish cleaners, but those are still sold without the safety lids and none of the kids was severely hurt! However, I did read several cases about adults imbibing some seriously dangerous liquids (like lye) with sometimes lethal consequences because they themselves put them in soda bottles and did not label them properly. In my personal opinion, these safety lids have one purpose only to make the item single-use. They may save one life in a million or so, but they definitively increase plastic pollution by an order of magnitude, and the lives that cost cannot be easily quantified.

Do we really need 10 different shapes of a bottle for a disinfectant that gets poured into the toilet? Is that what the famous customer choice  is about? In my opinion, the choice should be about what is in the bottle and how well it works.

And this got me thinking, could all this be avoided? In my opinion yes. But it has to be done from the top down by a legislative action that forces the...

My husband describes me as intense and hes absolutely right. Thats exactly how I feel most of the time. It can be unnerving and I dont know if its worse for me or the people around me. But despite the emotional war in my head, I try my best to be pleasant and polite after all, Im still a Midwesterner. 

I think my intensity stems from a lot of things my mental illness, my personality, past experiences, etc. However, I cant think of one singular event that left me feeling this way. In fact, I dont ever remember not feeling this way.

Did this get worse with age? Maybe. Everything became more intense when I became a parent. I love my playful, spunky little girl, but motherhood came with a million new things to be anxious about as well as a few crippling bouts of depression. I find relief in knowing I am not alone in this. For once in my life, Im not the odd one out because Im sure many other parents feel the same way.

Even though I experience overwhelming highs and lows, I dont always see it as a bad thing. Im a very passionate person. When Im interested in something, I grab ahold and give it two thousand percent. Im organized, driven, and ambitious and I will just run with it. Im proud of my accomplishments accomplishments that probably would have never happened if I wasnt this intense. 

I dont mean to be dramatic but that seems to be how my brain interprets everything. Some days I wish I could turn it off or at least down a couple of notches, but I cant. I feel fragile and anticipate that whatever happens next is going to break me.

Then again, some days I really see the positive aspects of my intensity. I accept it and wouldnt change it maybe even view it as a strength. I want everyone to feel my intensity through my art and writing. I think if you took it away I would be pretty boring. Its just a part of me and I wouldnt be the same without it. 

Can anyone relate? How do your loved ones describe you? If your highs and lows were amplified, would you find a way to use them to your benefit? If you have a mental illness like me, how do you separate your illness from your personality? Do you have the magical ability to relax?

Not feeling that I need to have the last word works well for me, and saves me an enormous amount of time.

(The Duplex)

This video follows a couple divers and their support team, as they cut through nine meters of ice (just under 30 feet, for my USian readers) to dive in the appropriately-named Lake Untersee, a large, freshwater lake on the edge of East Antarctica. Its frozen over year-round, but theres still plenty of liquid water, and as Jeff Goldbloom would say, life finds a way.

The picture shows fossilized stromatolites, cut into squares to show the many layers that made up the structure. The upper surface is covered with conical shapes, and you can see how the layers underneath built up to form them.

Normally when I cover research on or around Antarctica, it has to do with this planets climate, but Untersee is such a harsh and isolated location that the main interest, aside from studying whats down there, is in how it might help us find life in extreme conditions on other planets.

Whats down there, it seems, is stromatolites. These are layered structures formed by microbes gluing sand and other stuff together into their microbial mat. Over many generations, they form the alien shapes you can see on the lake floor in the video below. These structures fossilize well, which is probably why stromatolites represent the oldest evidence of life we have on this planet.

The divers first attempt, after a few days of digging a hole in ice, was aborted after the rebreather apparatus malfunctioned and started putting chemical-tainted water into the tube one of the divers was supposed to be breathing from. Just after they got the divers out, there was a storm with 100mph/160kph winds that lasted 24 hours, after which they had to dig all the snow out of their diving hole.

Ive never had a whole lot of interest in learning to use scuba gear. On the one hand, I think itd be pretty cool to be able to poke around underwater for a while like that, but on the other hand, there are a lot of ways it can go wrong, not to mention that I definitely dont have the money for a hobby like that. Even if I do take up diving someday, I can guarantee Ill never try it in a place like Antarctica. I definitely see the appeal, but as with cave exploration, Im afraid I may just be too much of a coward. As for diving in caves? Yeah, Ill pass on that. Honestl...