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Mob Rules
I’ve been busy this month doing the final preparations for my honors course on Collective Violence in American History. I’m thinking to do a series of posts and/or podcasts on riots and other disturbances. But just to give a flavor of things I’ve come across of late:
The New York Doctor’s Riot of 1788: Because cadavers were hard to come by doctors in the 1700s resorted to grave robbing. Physicians from the Columbia School of Medicine tended to target cemeteries for poor and black people, as this was less likely to anger anyone important. But when some black freedmen caught the graverobbers one night, it led to days of rioting throughout the city as angry mobs smashed up hospitals and tried to lynch physicians.
The Battle of Athens in 1946 stands out as an armed insurrection in the US that was actually successful! A group of WW2 veterans came home and began bumping heads with corrupt local political machine. It ends with them grabbing their guns, dynamiting the jail, beating up the sheriff and deputies, and replacing the local government. There’s a “scouring of the shire” vibe to the whole thing.
In 1923 the Ku Klux Klan held a banquet in Steubenville, Ohio. An anti-Klan mob, led by the Catholic group Knights of the Flaming Circle, descended upon them with clubs and bricks. The result was a melee in the streets involving over 2,000 people. Newspaper image courtesy of 1923 Live:
And in case you missed them, my preparations for the class have resulted in long posts on the violent radical groups of the 70s and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois.
Paging Dr. Moreau
Via Twitter, I learned about the existence of the humster:
A hybrid cell line made from a hamster oocyte fertilized with human sperm. This is possible due to the unique promiscuity of hamster ova, which allows them to fuse with non-hamster sperm. It always consists of single cells, and cannot form a multi-cellular being.
Which reminded me that a Soviet scientist supposedly made a serious try at a human- chimpanzee hybrid:
Ilya Ivanov was the first person to attempt to create a human–chimpanzee hybrid by artificial insemination…. In the 1920s, Ivanov carried out a series of experiments, culminating in inseminating three female chimpanzees with human sperm, but he failed to achieve a pregnancy. These initial experiments took place in French Guinea…. In 1929 he attempted to organize a set of experiments involving nonhuman ape sperm and human volunteers, but was delayed by the death of his last orangutan.
The same Wiki article reports another attempt in China that actually resulted in a successful pregnancy, though the pregnant chimp died of neglect during the Cultural Revolution because the scientist behind the whole thing had been shipped off to do farm work.
And then there’s this claim, from psychologist and mirror-test developer Gordon Gallup. He says a human-chimp hybrid was actually born in a Florida lab in the 1920s, only to be quickly killed by panicked researchers. Gallup got this story second-hand from an older professor, so take it with a grain of salt.
Homeschooling
My son and I finished lesson 100 of Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I can now firmly recommend this book, which was easy to use and led to good results in our case. The boy was just three when we started, so I didn’t push the pace very hard. We did three or four lessons a week, mixing in some practice with beginner Bob books as he progressed. Coming up on his fourth birthday, he now reads at a first-grade level or better.
Someone in the local homeschooling group recommended this book as a follow-up: The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. She said it takes them up through 4th grade level phonics. I haven’t tried it yet, though, so can’t judge. Comments are open if you have any other suggestions.
In terms of math, we’re working on addition and subtraction. I thank Holly Math Nerd for emailing me some curricular advice. Also, Holly has a few posts on math education that you might find worthwhile: How Not to Suck at Math Part 1 and Part 2. There’s also a post on the problems with Common Core math.
Again, comments are open if any of you can suggest kindergarten level math books or resources.
WVU in Crisis
Last winter the administration at WVU announced a $47 million shortfall, and their plan to fix things by downsizing the faculty and staff. The recommendations for cuts have come in, with 169 faculty to be laid off and the entire foreign language program to be scrapped. This only gets us partway toward the required cost savings, so there’s probably another round of layoffs coming. Morale is pretty low these days.
This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (account required) does a good job clarifying the reason for the budget crisis. The short story is President Gee had an ambitious plan to drastically increase enrollments — aiming to grow the student body by 20% in just a few years, despite rising costs and demographic headwinds. To this end WVU spent like a drunken sailor on new land, buildings, and even a new satellite campus. This was all financed with nearly a billion in debt. All the while the university was cutting spending on teaching, research, and service, and also upping tuition. He built it, but they didn’t come.
On Twitter, RogueWPA compared it to Disney’s failed Galactic Starcruiser hotel. It’s never a good sign when your workplace is getting compared to Disney-Lucasfilm.
Stack O’ Gee: At Systematic Hatreds, Paul Musgrave has a piece on the mess:
Maybe this is the story of Gordon Gee, academic entrepreneur, who never bets his own money and always keeps his winnings…. He earns about $800,000 a year in base salary at West Virginia now, although other sources peg his total compensation at more than $1.6 million…. ultimately Gee was gambling with other people’s careers. The faculty and staff who will lose their jobs because his bet (which, to be clear, I think was bad) didn’t pay off will pay for his mistakes.
Just a few weeks ago, the Board of Governors renewed Gee’s contract. Strong Kathleen Kennedy energy here.
College spending: Though WVU might have been unusually bad about it, university overspending is a widespread problem. At In My Tribe, Arnold Kling links to a Wall Street Journal piece on the issue. His own comment:
Universities do seem to have cut back in one area: the use of full-time faculty to teach. Instead, poorly-paid adjuncts have been increasingly employed.
Private colleges and universities went along with the spending boom. Perhaps they led it. The campus of my alma mater, Swarthmore college, is unrecognizable to anyone who went there in the 1970s. What was then a lavish performing arts center has since been replaced by. . . an even more lavish performing arts center.
The Mating Game
Stop Swiping: At The Free Press, Rob Henderson writes about the problem with the seemingly endless options of the app-facilitated dating market. Too many options can cause indecision and dissatisfaction:
One classic study found that consumers were more likely to buy a jam when they were presented with six flavors compared to 30. And among those who did make a purchase, the people presented with fewer flavors were more satisfied with their choice.
Another interesting bit:
According to the American Perspectives Survey, 43 percent of young women say they have no interest in dating whatsoever, compared with 34 percent of men.
I remember seeing statistics like that about Japan and thinking “huh, foreign culture.” Well, I still think that, but now about America too.
Henderson talks about the virtues of marriage. Along those lines, UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox announces a new book with a fairly straightforward message: Get Married. Aside from the message, it apparently involves some analysis of forces that make marriage difficult to pull off these days.
Dating Advice: I sympathize with people having difficulty in their mate search — there’s a reason I didn’t marry until my late 30s. Perhaps my younger self would have been well served by economist Bryan Caplan’s sage dating advice for men and also for women.
Selection for What? Caplan himself is a family man and seems genuinely happy — plus, with several children, he’s a Darwinian success story.
Though one can become a Darwinian success story by other, probably less fulfilling means. Hence a pair of South Carolina twins used some genetics websites to discover that they have 65 other siblings scattered across North America. All were sired by the same sperm donor.
BTW, if you check out the Wiki for men with most children, the top entries are all either great conquerors and sultans (Ghengis Khan) or fertility doctors (some of whom passed off their own sperm as sperm from other donors).
Lirty Dies
As I said a few posts ago, I’ve lost track of the inquiry into Covid’s origins. But one recent revelation was that an influential research paper touting the natural origin contained information that the authors knew to be misleading and that did not reflect their true beliefs. Nate Silver discusses:
The messages show that the authors were highly uncertain about COVID’s origins — and if anything, they leaned more toward a lab leak than a spillover from an animal source. But none of that was expressed in the “Proximal Origin” paper, which instead said that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.
….In the Slack and email messages, the authors worked to manipulate the media narrative about COVID-19’s origins and to ensure that their private uncertainty wasn’t conveyed in conversations with reporters. They also thought they were going to get away with it. “The truth is never going to come out ”, wrote Rambaut in one message. This went beyond mere motivated reasoning. There was an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly….”
Silver calls for reporters to have a bit more skepticism, even of supposed authorities:
The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco, with the lab leak having been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” and as misinformation even though many prominent scientists believed it to be plausible all along. Perhaps it’s tempting to give the media a pass….But I’m not inclined to, for two reasons.
First, the coverage of the recently leaked emails and Slack messages at major center-left outlets like The New York Times has been pathetic….And second, journalists ought to have decent bullshit detectors — including toward scientists, academics and other experts.
It’s a boom month for exposing academic dishonesty. As Silver notes, we’ve also seen the Stanford president resign over manipulating data in published papers. And two very successful academics who study dishonesty seem to have fabricated their data outright. To borrow a RogueWPA measurement, that’s about 10 gigaAlanises of irony.
Audiovisual Club
I recently appeared on The Harsha Reality Podcast, talking with host Harsha Perera about moral cultures in the East and West. I’m afraid I’m a little rambly, but Harsha is a good host and I enjoyed talking with him.
Friend and hobby filmmaker Apartment F1 Productions just dropped this new short film, Free Beer, on Youtube. It’s a psychedelic adventure in the streets of Richmond.
Finally, Dan Carlin has a new Hardcore History: More Steppe Stories. So happy Hardcore History Day to all who celebrate!
Thanks for stopping by!
Substacks cited above:
(In My Tribe) (Nate Silver)(The Free Press, featuring article by ) (Dan Carlin)
To your kindergarten math recommendation request: I have really liked Right Start Math. It's an abacus & manipulatives based system and is very effective. Level A is a kindergarten level and I was quite impressed at the range of concepts that were at least touched on. Really the only downside is that the manipulatives set is a big investment/commitment. (But highly effective!) There are a decent amount of homeschoolers' reviews online as it's a well-known curriculum. YouTube reviews may help to give a better visual overview.
Your "Doctors' riot" link is broken.