Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
If you have ever met me, you may have noticed that I am quite #tall. Not NBA-player tall, not quite "how's the weather up there?" tall, but certainly "can you get this thing for me off the top shelf" tall and "watch your head in this low doorway" tall. Just tall enough for the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages, on the whole. If I were any taller, it might go the other way.
Social advantages as much as physical ones, which is the point of this ramble. Men are often judged on their #height at least as much as any other trait. I mean, there are studies.
Height is an inborn characteristic, shaped by the combination of genetics and environment, and very rarely a matter of personal choice. Those are things that decent people don't make fun of, in case you missed the memo.
Gregory Bovino is quite #short, shorter than I am tall. Short enough, I'm sure, for it to make it difficult for him to find clothes and fit comfortably on some furniture. Short enough for people who should know better to be comfortable mocking him for it. Which for whatever reason, they're currently doing in abundance.
Bovino is an asshole. Probably one of the most miserable excuses for a human being ever to walk the Earth. Undoubtedly one of the worst people, using that term in its broadest sense, currently holding power in the United States of America. And you know, that's a pretty tough competition.
He deserves mockery aplenty. For his self-importance, for his incompetence, for his swaggering certainty that he's a central figure in the Fourth Reich instead of the disposable mook he really is. He's not Himmler or Heydrich. At most he's Röhm, and he might want to read up on how that ends, if he read at all. Absolutely, laugh at him now and keep on laughing when the long knives come out.
If you look past all that and laugh at him for his height instead, you're a lot more like him than you are like me, however tall or short you are. Your choice.
My worst fear, of course, is that none of us will live to see the end of the #regime. #Elections, #protests, attempted #revolution—anything we do will be futile. The future is a boot stamping on a human face, forever. Or at least close enough to forever for everyone around now.
If I believed that future was inevitable, I sure as hell wouldn't be talking about it on the internet. In fact I think the probability is less than a coin flip, although I won't even venture to guess by how much. The alleged people currently running things are absolutely as evil as anyone in history, but they're lazy and stupid. Maintaining a #tyranny is hard work.
So my second-worst fear, which I think we're a lot more likely to see, is that at some point things will get back to "normal," but measurably worse than they were before. We'll still have all the machinery of a police state, waiting for the next imperial wannabe to pick it up. Like we already did with the legacies of the Cold War and 9/11. It's a ratchet as well as a racket.
And absolutely none of them will ever face the consequences of their deeds. They may lose office. But they'll go on to profitable second careers as invited speakers and podcasters and talking heads, not as inmates. Pundits will intone that we need to forgive and forget and move on and heal.
We will always have to be lucky all the time. They'll only ever have to be lucky once.
"Sometimes I wonder if you people know how to tie your own shoes." — Me, to half the internet
I swear #climatologists think less about #climatechange, #epidemiologists think less about #vaccination, and #paleontologists think less about #evolution, than the crowd of screeching #denialists who descend like locusts on any news story even vaguely related to any of these subjects.
Well, crap. My #Twinings addiction is about to get even more expensive.
Seriously, in a backhanded way I think this is a good thing. Someone must have explained to him, using small words, that #invading #Greenland would be a very bad idea. He's not capable of true understanding, of course, but he's easily bullied. Like #bullies usually are.
#Creationists love the idea that the #genetic #code and #computer code are fundamentally the same thing. Since of course #programs are #designed (not always #intelligently, but that's another post) they think this is proof that life was too.
They seize on one-liners from those they regard as infidels and heretics, because then they can say, "See? Even unbelievers admit that ..." Bill Gates and Richard Dawkins, both known for going outside their lanes, are popular choices. Gates: "#DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created." Dawkins: "I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A #gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information."
I get why this is a popular analogy. Unfortunately, it's also a bad one. Those of us with one foot in each field know the differences far outweigh the similarities. Which leads me to the following epigram:
Many #programmers say genes look like code. Many #biologists say code looks like genes. No #bioinformaticist says either.
For anyone who's really looking for an excuse to scrub their brain out with bleach and a wire brush:
Since #Trump pardoned every member of the #J6 mob, 33 out of the approximately 1,500 released have been convicted of other #violent #crimes, a rate of 2.2%.
Elsenet, sumdood is arguing that this is no big deal because, and I quote, "The national violent crime rate is 4.4%." He argues that therefore, J6ers are less violent than the average person. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for everyone else!) he's not even close.
There were about 1.3 million violent crimes *reported* in the US last year, out of a population of about 330 million. Assuming one criminal and one victim per crime—which isn't necessarily the case, of course, but it's a reasonable approximation—that's a rate of 0.4%, not 4% or more.
The #arrest and #conviction rates are much lower. There are about 500,000 violent crime arrests each year, or 0.15%. I can't find conviction numbers at the moment, but they must be lower than arrest numbers: for convenience, let's say 0.10% of the population, 2/3 of those arrested, are convicted.
2.2% is a lot more than 0.10%. Even a #Republican ought to be able to figure that out.
Fuck these mass-murdering motherfuckers. And if you support them in any way, shape, or form, fuck you too.
So many things to be angry about. I need to triage. "Okay, the shithead in exam room 8 will probably be admitted to a jerk ward, but the fuckface in trauma bed 3 is definitely going to the ICU [idiot care unit], and someone prep the asshat we parked out in the hallway for a cephalanalectomy ..."
Dipping my toe in the waters of prediction:
I will be very surprised if there is not a large, open #US ground presence in #Venezuela in the next six months, if not sooner. Maybe a significant #Chinese presence too, but that will be quieter, a la the #USSR in #Vietnam.
The funny thing is, there's a way we probably *could* install a government that would be popular enough to survive with just US support rather than #GIs bleeding out in the jungle—namely, back #Machado and give her whatever she needs to consolidate power. But #Trump is too angry about a #Hispanic woman getting the #Nobel he so clearly deserved for that ever to happen. Not to mention his crew of chest-and-Bible-thumpers who don't want to see any woman in charge of any country, ever.
So instead we'll end up keeping most of #Maduro's machinery of dictatorship in place, and supporting it against an ever-growing resistance armed with Chinese weaponry. "Advisers" in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Tell the DJ to put Fortunate Son on repeat.
The #slipperyslope is not a #fallacy.
Proof: [gestures vaguely at everything] #QED.
I just opened a feature request on #GitHub that got assigned issue number 404. Hopefully someone will see it even so!
Another addendum: like many #SF writers, I'm a bit of a #Luddite when it comes to the writing process. After decades of messing around with various word processors, these days I do my writing in #Markdown using a text editor, then convert it to Word for sharing it with the rest of the world. I'm genuinely happier that way. #Grammar checkers and the like can fuck right off.
But I'm uneasy with people who create #sciencefiction rejecting the *idea* that #AI might be useful for #creative endeavors. I don't yet know what a good use case would be, and I doubt I'll ever want #ChatGPT or one of its descendants to write a draft for me. Making it my work would feel like editing someone else's manuscript, even if it's good—which of course current AI writing isn't, but that could change. I just don't want people who think about the future professionally to assume that we'll never advance past the present.
Jamming the two together: I'm alternately amused and annoyed by how much #ScienceFiction has #humans doing things like #flying #spaceships, but relegates #medical care to #robots. Uh ...
As both a #medic and a #writer, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the ethical bar for #fiction #writing is *far* lower than the bar for #medicine. Reading a bad story may make you feel like you've wasted an irretrievable chunk of your life, but it's very unlikely to land you in the morgue. So the idea that there might be ethical uses for #AI in medicine but not in writing seems rather strange to me.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
