Polyploid

Jan 2, 2020 I've been up since before five. The world has been burning in flats below me for days on end. I woke up a from a dream. From a nightmare. I killed a woman. I killed her in a dream. I was on mushrooms, and I thought she'd been fatally injured. I didn't want to do it, it just happened, and I fled, or at least that's what I tell myself In the reality of the dream, I'd shared the mushrooms with her. We were on some sort of a rollercoaster, and she did something stupid, and she injured herself. I didn't want people to know what had happened. I didn't want to be held responsible for her death. I didn't want people to find out. I didn't want go to jail. So I beat her to death. Other people saw. They knew. Her frat-boy friends. They knew. It happened in my hometown of Kent, Ohio. Since the dream I've carried the guilt of her death for years. It was one of those hyperrealistic dreams. The kind where there are colors, and maybe even smells. So ...

A thought... It's a frequent refrain in some circles that academia is being overrun by political correctness in the form of racial and gender politics. It is true to the extent that there seem to be many articles about gender and race. It is often impugned that this is being pushed by radical liberals and feminists (aka Social Justice Warriors) be those faculty or students. I'd like to offer an alternative interpretation. The activity in racial studies and gender studies (i.e. the study of women) in academia does not reflect an agenda of social change. It reflects the desire to succeed in academia by finding new truth. For centuries the impact of non-white people and women on the world has been systematically ignored in academia. To discover a new (and often significant) truth, all one has to do, is to look at an existing field, and ask one's self, how does it relate to people of color or women? If you ask this question, then you will find undiscovered or unrecognized facts...

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began I've seen the idea posited that diseases evolve to become less deadly over time. I want to show who we know that this idea is wrong. The idea that antigenic drift leads to less deadly variants is a misunderstanding of host-disease co-evolution. It is generally true that if a disease and its primary host organisms have been co-evolving for many generations then we expect fewer hosts to die from the disease. One interpretation is that the disease has become less deadly. Another interpretation is that the host population as a whole has become more resistant to the disease. In the first case, the proposed mechanism is that disease organisms which kill their hosts don't spread as much, so the less virulent strains survive. In the second case, the mechanism is the disease kills off all the susceptible hosts before they can breed, and in later generations there only resistant hosts remaining. So lets do a thought experiment, and see how this plays ou...

 Why does bigotry feel like a personal affront to me? I'm a white dude. I have a good education. I make good money. My father and mother had college degrees.I spent the first ten years of my life in North Eastern Ohio. Why then do i end up in a place where injustice angers me so? On the inside? I grew up poor. My family was on welfare. My father was mentally ill. It was controlled by drugs, but he was still not the person that my Mother had married. My memories start in married student's housing at Kent State University. My friends came from all over the world. There was Tarumi from Japan. There was Fonzi from Nigeria. There were the Greek kids a few doors down that could barely speak English. There were my friends Buddy and Glen from Hawaii. There was Brian and Joy Marcano from Venezuela. There was Jordi and his mother Royce, the woman who introduced us children to Vodun around the campfire. And then there the two weird kids from Kansas. After three and half years we moved. We...

Biden has won. The votes remain to be counted, but there seems to be no mathematical way that Trump can win. Some are advocating that we should show sympathy for those who voted for Trump, and I'm having a hard time with this. On the day after Trump won a man walked up to a friend of mine on the street. In the middle of the day,  he reached out, and he grabbed her by the crotch. In the ensuing months Trump supporters attacked multiple people in my extended community. One was even killed.  And this was in San Francisco, not Texas or Mississippi. I had friends gassed on the streets while peacefully protesting. Trump supporters have been saying that I and my friends are the enemies of America. I have had Trump supporters tell me that when he was re-elected that I would be prosecuted, or that people like me (liberals) should be forced to leave the country so that we understood what being an American really meant.* I can't see a reason why we should coddle the right-wing snowflakes...

US Police kill African Americans at twice the rate of white Americans. There seems to be some debate around this even all the numbers are publicly available. Here's how the computation works: We want to compare the two rates. The easiest way to do this is by comparing the ratios of African Americans shot to whites shot, and this requires only four numbers. First you need to know how many black people and white people are killed by the police each year. The Washington Post has this information. ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ ) The Washington Post reports that over the last five years 1351 African Americans have been shot by the police. In the same time 2597 white Americans (non-hispanic) have been shot.  Next you need to know the two populations' representation in the total US population. Wikipedia reports that African Americans are 13.4 percent of the population, and whites (non-hispanic) are 60.1 percent of the population. (...

Antifa is a handy label for people who like to dress up in black and beat up fascists. Those of us who go to political protests see them from time to time. Or we see people wearing black. Usually they're in their late teens or early twenties. They're kind of jerks, but they're mostly harmless unless you're a fascist stupid enough to get agro at a rally against fascism, or if you're stupid enough to hold a right-wing rally in Berkeley. Despite their niche existence, during the last year the right has turned them into boogiemen. Some weeks ago a Trump supporter challenged my description of them. She insisted that they were a national network with international connections. When I challenged her to present evidence, she posted a link to a video by a group called Project Veritas: https://www.projectveritas.com/f085d003-ac4b-472a-b008-384d12bafd5b After viewing this video, I thought the assertions were full of it, and debunking it wasn't worth my time. I came out of ...