Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

Hello, all. I’ve been around for a few days but haven’t yet made an #introduction post. So here we go.

I’m a #bioinformatics consultant with The Bioinformatics CRO working on a variety of small and large projects ranging from fundamental genomics to clinical decision support. Before that, for several years I was a postdoc and ORISE fellow specializing in high-altitude medicine and physiology at the University of Colorado Altitude Research Center. My academic background is a nearly even mix of #biostatistics, machine learning, and biology.

The ARC* has been sadly moribund for a few years, but thanks to collaborations with other groups, we’re starting to get more active again. Hopefully I will have more to say about that in the future. Meanwhile, feel free to ask me anything about #altitude medicine—I think I still remember most of it.

Years before that, I was an Air Force #medic (after a brief stint as an Army infantryman) followed by a couple of years as a civilian EMT. My time in patient care informs my approach to science: the numbers I crunch represent human lives.

Otherwise, I’m an armchair #paleontologist hoping to be able to call myself an amateur paleontologist again one of these days—by which I mean actually spending some time in the field and/or the prep lab—a too-occasional science fiction writer, and chronically sleep deprived. Also, my life is the internet: it’s cats all the way down.

*Fellow #Primeval fans may recognize the jacket in the picture. My wonderful fiancée found it for me when I was hired at the ARC, for exactly the reason you think.

Poetic license now that I think about it carefully: it was actually eleven years. But three of those years were part-time, so it kind of works if you turn your head sideways and squint. Anyway, I like the flavor of the classics.

On a Los Angeles Times post, somebody commented, “Californians may not miss Elon Musk, but the economy will.”

I was curious enough to look this up: last year #Tesla had $24.9 billion in #revenue, and #SpaceX $8.7 billion, while #California’s #GDP was $3.9 trillion. So very roughly, Tesla + SpaceX revenue was almost 1% of California GDP, although I doubt all or even most of that money actually stayed in California.

That’s not insignificant, but it’s not vital either. Given California’s overall economic power, I think the state will absorb Musk’s departure just fine, especially since there’s no way to move a major industrial operation all at once. And most of Tesla’s manufacturing is already outside the state.

The main economic impact of moving everything to #Texas may be to (slightly) ameliorate the famously high housing prices in the Bay Area and LA metro. Also, it will raise the average intelligence of both states. That’s a win-win!

From comments on a post elsenet: “If I’d wanted to stay in business programming, I wouldn’t have hung on the World-Tree a.k.a. grad school for nine years, a sacrifice of myself to myself. And my eye-socket itches.”

I can hear this gravestone, and I bet now you can too.

My texts and private messages have blown up. It might be a while before I get through the backlog. And the rock cried out, no hiding place.

I wish #Biden hadn’t stepped down. I believe, and will continue to believe, that he could have won—if #Democrats had rallied around him after the debate fiasco, instead of being so eager to throw him off the sleigh in the desperate hope of distracting the wolves. But we don’t do that, do we? Fucking ever. The circular firing squad is always ready. Democrats fall in love, and then they fall out of it, while #Republicans fall in line.

Well. This is where we are now. As the prophecy foretold. The prophet was Octavia Butler, BTW. Seriously, go read Parable of the Talents again and tell me you don’t see it.

The nominee has to has to has to be Vice President #Harris. She’s our best chance of national survival. I will not be taking questions at this time.

If I were a Party official, I’d seriously try to plant someone in the audience to yell “Give ‘em hell, Harris!” at an opportune moment during her next speech. So, of course, she could come back with “I don’t give them hell. I tell the truth and they think it’s hell!” But probably no one will do that. Lack of showmanship is almost as much a Democratic flaw as lack of party discipline.

Yeah, I’m scared. If you’re not, you’re not paying attention.

Take some time. Absorb the impact. Process the fear and anger and grief. Do what you have to do, for as long as you need.

Please come back when you can. We have roughly three and a half months to figure out how to save our country. Anyone who seriously decides to get out, and can make it happen—I don’t blame you. Most of us don’t have that option.

Good afternoon, and good luck.

Yes, I’m quite sure many of the 1/6 participants discussed their plans to make war on the United States on #Xitter.

I find this a horribly believable future, except I’m pretty sure some flavor of Protestants would win the battle.

🎼The Eagle has landed, tell your children when
Time won’t drive us down to dust again!

For years I sang along to those words and felt them as they were intended: I believed that of all humanity’s ephemeral accomplishments, at least one would last. In one sense it’s still true. We did this thing, made a mark on another world that will almost surely outlast any monument on our own. Reached beyond our home to touch something outside the warm, nurturing blanket of atmosphere. Took our first tottering steps as a spacefaring species. Not once, but several times, to show it was no fluke.

“We” is not metaphorical, by the way. I was a baby on July 20, 1969, but my father was hard at work making it happen, one of hundreds of thousands. I grew up in a house full of space memorabilia. It is, in every sense, in my blood.

And then, the long retreat. From far beyond the blanket to barely past its outer edge. Not a collapse but a slow steady grinding down, an ill-maintained machine juddering toward its inevitable halt. The world in those brightly colored pamphlets and posters slipping from our grasp. Promises that always took too long or cost too much. Science and exploration transmuted, by a kind of reverse alchemy, to rich madmen’s ego games.

It’s been a long time since I believed that hopeful future was inevitable, and now I seriously wonder if it’s even possible. Scientifically possible, technically possible, economically possible—oh yes, it’s still all of those. Politically possible, there’s the rub. Socially possible. Possible by imagination and courage and will. Maybe not. Maybe 1969-1972 was a unique high point, one of those shining moments that will never come again. We all have those in our lives, and we learn to live with them.

The footprints are still there. Still I can look up at the sky and hope I’ll live long enough to see someone return.

Fascinating bit of #scientific #history: using #radio #astronomy to measure #continental #drift. These days they just do it with #GPS, of course.

https://ipnpr.jpl.nasa.gov/progress_report2/42-56/56I.PDF

Some setting the record straight about Thomas Matthew #Crooks, the attempted #assassin of convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John #Trump. This is as much for my own reference as anything, but I’ll be happy if it’s useful to anyone else.

The following are verifiable facts:

1. He donated money to the Progressive Turnout Project, a #Democratic #PAC. Early reports that the donor was another Thomas Crooks, living in another part of Pennsylvania, appear to be false. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-donation/

2. He was a registered #Republican. He donated to PTP on January 20th, 2021, the day Biden was inaugurated, when he was 17. He registered as a Republican in September 2021, shortly after he turned 18. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-shooter-republican/

There is really no contradiction here.

It’s hard to remember now, but #President Joe #Biden took office with very high approval ratings. My guess is that like a lot of other people, Crooks was feeling pretty good about President Biden in January 2021, but soured on him by fall of that year. There was no good reason for this; people didn’t give President Biden nearly enough time to clean up the mess convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump left behind. But the rapid change in the national mood is undeniable.

Many people are pretty aimless in their late teens and early twenties, searching for an adult identity. Crooks was an extreme and tragic example.

There is a very long conversation to be had about why members of a certain demographic to which he belonged are much more prone than others to turning their search for identity into grotesque violence—but that’s not what this post is about. Just trying to make sure the facts are clear. Supporters of convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump don’t care about facts at all, as they’ve shown over and over. We can and should do better.

So now that the facts are clear, let’s get back to making sure convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald John Trump never gets within a mile of the White House again, by legitimate means if at all possible.

Presented without comment.

#Pasta evolved. It rebelled. There are many noodles. AND IT HAS A PLAN.

My Facebook Memories from 2020 and 2021 are full of posts about #Covid-19. It’s so weird to me how that’s just vanished from the national conversation.

Everyone knew at least one person who died from it, often more than one. Nearly everyone was terrified of dying from it themselves, and the ones who weren’t were burying their heads in the sand. It killed a million Americans in a year and a half—more than every war we’ve fought, combined, for a century and a half. At its height, it was far and away the leading cause of death. It still kills people, albeit at a much reduced rate: far less than the big killers like heart disease and cancer, but about ten times as many as die in motor vehicle accidents. You know, by way of comparison.

And it will happen again. Maybe a new strain of SARS-CoV2, maybe influenza, maybe something else entirely. Something is out there right now, something that doesn’t infect humans, or causes at most mild symptoms, or isn’t easy to catch. Yet. Mindlessly waiting for the next mutation, for its turn.

I don’t know what it’s like in other countries. In the US, we seem to have collectively decided to pretend it never happened. We’re good at that, of course—if we weren’t, the current political landscape would look very different. And I don’t want this to be about politics, but of course it is. When the next plague strikes, and the next after that, and the next after that, our response will depend critically on who’s in charge. Sorry, folks, pathogens don’t care about market-based solutions.

Honest, I’m not trying to ruin anyone’s day. I just can’t quite believe that we’ve all tacitly agreed to this case of national amnesia. But I suppose I don’t have much choice.

I’ve written posts like this before, and no doubt will again. But I think it’s a drum worth beating.

Here’s the thing about ad hominem and its obverse, argument from authority: they’re not always wrong. Overall, I’d guess (without making any claims of having actual evidence) that they’re right more often than not.

In a perfect world, we’d have full information about everything, all the time, and could evaluate any claim purely on its merits. But of course we don’t live in that world. So we have to trust people who know more about a particular subject than we do, and who have a record of talking about the subject honestly … and we’re wise to distrust people who are demonstrably ignorant, or who have a record of lying.

I know a whole lot about gene regulation, a fair amount about gene-disease prediction and gene-drug interaction, and a little about everything else that falls under the bioinformatics umbrella. Thanks to my former career, I remember a great deal about emergency medicine and infectious disease epidemiology, but while that’s still useful knowledge, it’s out of date. And I know a little bit about paleontology, purely as a hobby.

That’s about it. On those subjects, particularly those at the top of the list, I’m trustworthy. People who haven’t studied them at all should believe what I say.

On everything else … I’m at best a well-informed layman, and often not even that. Like everyone else: nobody can possibly know more than a tiny sliver of everything there is to know. There aren’t enough hours in a day, days in a year, or years in a lifetime to do any more.

You also have people—a lot of people—who are proudly, willfully ignorant, but talk endlessly on the subjects they know the least about. Most creationists, antivaxers, and climate change deniers fall into this category. They take their cues from the much smaller number of people who are knowledgeable in the subjects at hand, but are deliberately lying for ideological reasons. These people know enough to craft convincing lies which the rest then repeat at length.

When you’re dealing with qualified experts in a field not your own, who have given no reason to think they’re habitual liars, the best source of knowledge is what they say. If the experts disagree, the best you can do is listen to what most of them say. The majority may be wrong, and the minority may be right—but that’s for them to hash out. Kibitzers are almost guaranteed not to make any meaningful contribution to the conversation.

And when you’re dealing with people who have shown they’re habitual liars, or who proudly proclaim their ignorance but nonetheless have a strong opinion, by far the wisest course is to dismiss their claims out of hand. Ignore them if you can, mock them if you like, fight them if you must. But never let them pretend their voices are equal to those of people who have a meaningful say. Both-sides-ism is a fatal trap.

James #Inhofe is dead. I hope his spot in Hell is at a pleasant temperature when he arrives, but then steadily gets warmer … and warmer … and warmer … Satan should be very amused by his constant denials.

#seemslegit

I bet you can guess the context.

“Of course. Everyone is ignorant of nearly everything. The totality of human knowledge is too vast for any one person to learn more than a tiny fraction of it in a lifetime, and all possible knowledge is far greater than that. All I can do is try to learn my little sliver, and maybe if I’m lucky contribute a little more.

“But I do know how we know what we know, and some dude sitting in his truck making a YouTube video about how evolution is fake and vaccines are a (((globalist))) plot and global warming is a hoax because it snowed yesterday ain’t it.”

Eloquent and succinct.