Salon gives readers a choice between unblocking ads or letting their site use your computer to “mine cryptocurrency”

February 13, 2018 • 11:30 am

If you go to Salon (I rarely do, and I’m not doing it any more), you get a choice of two options if you want to read anything:

I use ad blocker, as I find ads truly annoying (I even pay to keep them off this site). Yes, I know that those ads help pay for Salon‘s writers, but if they don’t want you to use ad-blocking, they’re perfectly capable of preventing you from seeing the site. And the site isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit anyway. The writing is dire, propagandistic, and, to my mind, not worth my $$.

But if you want to “block ads by allowing Salon to use your unused computing power”, that power will be used, as the Financial Times reports, to engage in something that sounds dubious, and I won’t engage in:

That is the idea behind a programme that left-leaning US media group Salon began testing on Monday, according to a spokesperson.

“For our beta program, we’ll start by applying your processing power to help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies,” it says, opening up an intriguing new potential revenue stream for media companies.

Users wishing to avoid pop-up ads are presented with a new pop-up, which indicates the website would “like to use your computing power”. The website will use your processor “for calculations”, it says, claiming the program will be run “securely” without the need to install any additional software.

The pop-up seen by fastFT says the scheme is powered by Coinhive, which has developed a program that runs in users’ web browsers, allowing companies to mine monero — a cryptocurrency similar to the more well-known bitcoin. The required number-crunching miner can be embedded “directly into [their] website”.

Salon’s explanation is this:

What is Salon doing with my computer if I decide to opt-in?

Salon is instructing your processor to run calculations. Think of it like borrowing your calculator for a few minutes to figure out the answer to math problems, then giving it back when you leave the site. We automatically detect your current processing usage and assign a portion of what you are not using to this process. Should you begin a process that requires more of your computer’s resources, we automatically reduce the amount we are using for calculations.

Perhaps some readers know about this “mining”, but I’m not about to let anybody else use my computer’s power. Nor do I want to see ads. I thus opt for the third alternative: stop reading Salon. They could allow you a limited number of articles per month, like the New York Times, or make some of their articles free, like The New Yorker, but that isn’t happening. Given how lame the site is—famous, for one thing, for attacking New Atheists on dubious grounds—I’m just going to stop reading it.

In one sense I’m glad this is happening, for they wouldn’t be doing this if Salon wasn’t in financial trouble. And they admit it:

Back in the 1990s, as now, Salon offered the common relationship of serving ads to its users in exchange for keeping most of our content free. The principle behind this is that your readership has value both to us and to our advertisers. Recently, with the increasing popularity of ad-blocking technology, there is even more of a disintegration of this already-tenuous relationship; like most media sites, ad-blockers cut deeply into our revenue and create a more one-sided relationship between reader and publisher.

We realize that specific technological developments now mean that it is not merely the reader’s eyeballs that have value to our site — it’s also your computer’s ability to make calculations, too. Indeed, your computer itself can help support our ability to pay our editors and journalists.

I’m outa there, and I won’t shed a tear if the site goes away.

h/t: Cindy

FIRE’s worst colleges for free speech, and their Lifetime Censorship Award

February 13, 2018 • 10:15 am

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has named the ten worst American campuses for free speech over the last year. In addition, they’ve given a “Lifetime Censorship” award to a school with a persistent history of censorship over time. Click on the screenshot below if you want to see the distressing details.

First, FIRE notes that this list includes both public and private colleges. The former are bound by law to observe the First Amendment, while the private colleges on the list “explicitly promise to do so.” They add that “90 percent of schools still maintain codes that either clearly restrict or could too easily be used to restrict free speech.”  That’s appalling!

Here are the bad schools, and you can read about what they did to make the list on FIRE’s site. I am further appalled that Harvard, my Ph.D. alma mater, is on the list, but I’ve documented their suppression of dissent several times on this site (see some of those posts here). The list is in no special order, so the ones at the top or bottom aren’t necessarily the worst offenders.

On to the Hall of Shame:

  1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY).
  2. Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA)
  3. Harvard University (Cambridge, MA).  I’ve written before (here, here, and here) about how Harvard punishes students who belong to single-sex off-campus groups (including women’s groups); this violates freedom of association. There are two other incidents of bad behavior as well. I’m not saddened to see the resignation of President Drew Faust, who pushed through the “no freedom of association” policy; her replacement will be the former President of Tufts University, Lawrence Bacow.
  4. Los Angeles Community College District. Every campus is off limits to free speech except in restricted zones: one the size of three parking spaces!
  5. Fordham University (New York, NY). Fordham has denied recognition to Students for Justice in Palestine, and even sanctioned students who protested that decision. While I think SJP is largely anti-Semitic, it still deserved to be recognized and allowed to promote on-campus activities.
  6. Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA). If you’ve read here, you’ll know all about this odious and censorious school. Nobody should be sending their kids there.
  7. Albion College (Albion, MI)
  8. Northwestern University (Evanston IL). If you’ve read Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia on Campus, as I have, you’ll know how hamhanded Northwestern is when adjudicating sexual harassment cases and censoring those who write about them (or about sex in general). Kipnis herself was subject to a Title IX investigation for simply writing a book about Title IX investigations!
  9. The University of California at Berkeley. Milo Yiannopoulos, David Horowitz’s and Ben Shapiro’s proposed appearances caused threats that led to their talks’ cancellations. Berkeley promises to do better, but we’ll see
  10. Texas State University (San Marcos, TX). I’ve written before about a racist editorial in the school paper (an anti-white piece written by a Hispanic) that was not only withdrawn, but was followed by students calling for the editor’s resignation and all kinds of anti-free speech insanity. While the editorial was “hate speech” by most people’s definition, I defended the paper’s right to publish it.

Finally, the “Lifetime Censorship Award” went to Chicago’s own DePaul University, which FIRE indicts for “its decade-long rap sheet of censorship spanning the ideological spectrum.” (See some of my posts here.) The rap sheet is long and shameful.

As lagniappe, I invite you to inspect FIRE’s “Disinvitation Database“, which gives all reported cases of invited speakers being disinvited or de-platformed.  It goes from 2000 to the present, and if you read through it you’ll see that early on cases of censorship by the Right and Left were pretty much equally numerous, but in the last five years most cases of censorship have been by Leftists. The campus political climate can’t have changed that much over 18 years, and only the last year can be attributed to Trump. We on the Left can do better than this.

h/t: Cesar

Spot the gorilla!

February 13, 2018 • 9:20 am

While I write a new post, here’s some fun. Reader Roger sent a photo of his cat with a “spot the. . .” quiz and a note. I think this would be classified as “dead easy”:

For a bit of weekday morning fun, Aeryn invites you to play “Spot the gorilla.”

A bit more about Gorilla Cat: “Aeryn’s the 14-year old who was born in one of my window wells.”

“Evidence” for a flat Earth (round Earth illusion created by Satan)

February 13, 2018 • 8:00 am

Yes, there are still some severely deluded souls who think the Earth is flat. I got a long screed from one of them, a “John P.”,  in my email this morning. The second half of the email, which I’ll omit, gives equally compelling evidence for God. I’ve reproduced the words exactly as I received them. My favorite bit is the part where you can see Corsica (from your house?) He didn’t explain why the theory of evolution is a “blatant lie.”

Dear Mr Coyne,

Our education is flawed.

I’ve discovered evidence that the theory of evolution is a blatant lie and that the “big bang”, “space”, spinning “globe” theory is a blatant lie.

Firstly here is “flat” earth evidence I’ve discovered. The curve is supposed to be 66 feet over 10miles but is apparent nowhere and we can see beyond that distance. Corsica can be seen from 137 miles away. The suez canal is 100 miles long and has no locks. The Sahara Desert, the Tibetan Plateau and the West Siberian Plains are flat. The equator could not be the warmest part of the earth on a “tilted globe”.

All stars revolve around Polaris, the North/Pole Star. If we were on a ball circling the sun we should see new stars every day for a year as a lighthouse illuminates the sky surrounding it. The cycle should repeat every year. At any one time the majority of space should be invisible due to the sun’s light. Instead we see the same stars from somewhere on earth throughout the year. We can see Mercury and Venus at night which are between the earth and the sun. This is impossible with heliocentricity. In reality we have a celestial dome covering the earth through which the sun circulates.

Tides are not uniform and do not affect lakes. Tides and the seasons are central to feeding and reproduction. Pilots and engineers do not account for the curve. Pilot training manuals are based on a flat earth.

Gyroscopes show the earth is still. The cycle of the moon bears no correlation to that of the sun. It’s logical that surface water cannot curve as we are told is the case over vast oceans. We know water reacts physically to movement yet we see no evidence of movement in the water that surrounds us. Ships that disappear over the horizon come back into view with telescopes. There is no 24hour sunlight in the south pole. Antarctica is 30degrees colder than the arctic. It is the coldest place on earth with a low of -90 degrees. 70% of the earth’s fresh water is in Antarctica.

The Abyssal plains at the floors of the oceans are flat and have no sediment.

In 1946 US Admiral Byrd went with 4700 troops in OPERATION HIGH JUMP. Planes smashed into invisible “barriers” and it got closed off to the public.

In 1875 hms Challenger “circumnavigated” the Antarctic. It took 69,000miles. The circumference of God’s earth is 52,800miles. They would have gone 5 times round the fake Antarctica. Many sailors died because they were assuming the globe model and in fact the Longitude’s are longer in the southern hemisphere so thinking they had travelled round land they ended up hitting it! The Arctic circle is 66.6 degrees north. The Antarctic Circle is 66.6 degrees south. It has circular coastline, there’s a Deception Island, Elephant Island and Enderby Land. Weddell Sea, Ellsworth mountains. It was explored in 1911 and Amundsen reached the “centre” in 1911. How did they even know where the centre was. It has places called Titan Dome, Law Dome, Dome Charlie and Dome Argus.

The US Thule base in Greenland is used to detect inter ballistic missiles. I thought that’s what satellites did!

There is plenty of evidence on youtube showing the moon landings were fake. The same background is used repeatedly. The shadows are inconsistent. How do you take photos with an antiquated camera and a space suite on. Why was there no dust on the “spaceship”. How does a rocket work in a vacuum. How can you effect direction in a vacuum. Scientists say the Van Allen Belt above the earth is impenetrable. See Edward Hendrie(2016), Rob Skiba, Bradon Edge and Casper Stith(2017) for more flat earth evidence.

Our bodies and that of animals and creatures are designed to detect movement yet we are told we cannot detect the earth moving at 66,600mph. These are lies.

UPDATE: I forgot to add this bit. implicating the Hornéd One:

As to who would and could create the lie? One obvious answer is satan to conceal God! We are therefore talking about the spirit realm and we do not know how profoundly the spirit realm can impact our world. The indignation and ferocity with which many attack this concept shows they’re afraid of this evidence becoming mainstream. My research shows this is central to the battle between God and satan which is a spiritual battle. 

It sounds ludicrous and personally it has spiritual significance but it should concern everyone because it exposes the reality that our establishment can and does control the evidence which is promulgated. Science and education promulgate only the evidence that fits an agenda. Flat earth is by no means the only realm of suppression of evidence.

And so it goes. If you have the spoons, feel free to refute any of these “arguments”. I’ll give just one:

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

February 13, 2018 • 6:30 am

The snow has abated here, at least for a while, and while it’s clear on this Fat Tuesday, February 13, 2018, it’s still cold: 11° F (-12° C). It’s also National Italian Food Day, and World Radio Day, celebrating the powers of wireless (not computers!) Remember that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and if you haven’t got swag for your significant other, get on the stick!

Posting may be light today as I have stuff to do. Like Maru, I do my best.

On February 13, 1542, yet another one of Henry VIII’s wives was executed, in this case Catherine Howard (wife #5). She was beheaded for “adultery” at only 21.  On this day in 1633, Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition. He was found guilty of heresy, forced to recant, and spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest. (Of course, as all accommodationists tell us, this had nothing to do with religion.)  In 1689, William and Mary were designated as co-rulers of England (have there been co-rulers since?), and gave their names to my beloved alma mater. On this day in 1935, Bruno Hauptmann was found guilty of the kidnapping of the “Lindbergh baby” (Charles’s Lindbergh’s son) two years before. It’s not clear that he was guilty, but he was electrocuted. On this day in 1955, Israel obtained four of the seven Dead Sea scrolls.  In 1961, a supposedly 500,000-year-old rock or concretion was found near Olancha, California, containing a modern spark plug. This “Coso artifact” was of course touted by creationists, but has since had a more prosaic explanation.  On this day in 1990, an agreement was made for the reunification of Germany.  Finally, exactly one year ago today, Kim Jong-nam was murdered in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, almost surely by the agents of his half-brother, DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

Notables born on this day include Thomas Robert Malthus (1766), Lord Randolph Churchill (1849; Winston’s dad), Grant Wood (1891), William Shockley (1910), Chuck Yeager (1923; still with us at 95), Elaine Pagels (1943), Jerry Springer (1944), Marian Stamp Dawkins (1945), and Mena Suvari (1979). Those who died on February 13 include Catherine Howard (1542; see above), Benvenuto Cellini (1571), Cotton Mather (1728), Richard Wagner (1883), Waylon Jennings (2002), and, two years ago, Antonin Scalia.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pining for Spring:

Hili: All this will be green again.
A: We have to wait a bit more.
Hili: I will sleep through part of this waiting.
In Polish:
Hili: To wszystko będzie znowu zielone.
Ja: Jeszcze trochę musimy poczekać.
Hili: Część tego czekania prześpię.

In nearby Wloclawek, Leon finally got his cat treats sent by Hiroko (Leon’s staff at last visited Andrzej and Malgorzata). Leon loved them!

Leon: Do you still insist that I’m a poor eater? Hiroko Kubota and Jerry Coyne know what I like BEST!
And up in Winnipeg, the difficult task continues of making a photographic thermometer based on Gus’s nose color. It gets pinker when it’s cold, and my theory (which is mine) is that one could determine the outside temperature by making a color scale of Gus’s nose and matching it to the scale when he comes inside. His staff Taskin, long hectored by me to do this, reports:

Gus went out this morning, I was very surprised because it is quite cold, -25C. I took outside and inside pictures but I’m not sure if the difference in pinkness is really apparent. He doesn’t sit still for such photos…

Outside:

Inside:

A pun tweet found by Grania:

From Matthew: Earthworms mating. He noted that

“There are no indigenous Canadian earthworms. Think glaciers. 15,000 years ago it was all ice and rock. How long does it take worms to migrate from the unglaciated south? So how does indigenous soil ecology work? Very good question. No one really knows – I’ve asked soil experts. Worms you get in Canada are Brit imports in general.”

These, I suppose, are official symbols of the Olympics, reinterpreted for the ignorant:

An “infernal cat machine” (watch the video):

Watch this lovely video about a sickly kitten rescued by a husky. Now they’re BFFs:

Matthew called this one “Rhino in the snow,” which reminds me of the Doors song “Riders on the Storm”:

And this one from Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll, who retweeted it with the caption, “This seems like magic, but it’s just Fourier transforms (expressing a function as a sum of periodic functions). Which are a kind of magic, I admit.”

 

Evolutionists at work

February 12, 2018 • 2:00 pm

There are lots of evolutionists posting on the #Istudyevolution Twitter site. Here’s some pictures of evolutionists I know—friends and colleagues I speak to:

Neil is in the next building:

Everyone calls her “Sally”, she’s multifarious and fiercely smart:

Graham took my graduate speciation course, and now he’s a fancy-shmancy professor and a big contributer to the study of human migration via genetics:

Mohamed: my second student and now a professor at Duke and former chair of biology

And Daniel was a “grandstudent”—a student of Mohamed who also studies speciation:

Hopi’s a Harvard professor, but we wrote two papers together before she moved to Cambridge from San Diego:

Leonie studies speciation in plants, and was here for CoyneFest:

Jon Losos, who I saw a few weeks ago. He’s just left Harvard to run an institute in St. Louis:

I don’t really know Sally, but we’ve featured her on this site twice (here and here), and I like to see young people studying flies!

I know Jake because he married my former technician, Susannah:

And I added one too, from a while back when we collected flies in the mist forest of São Tomé. Of course I misspelled “hybrid zone”!

With all those enthusiastic people turning out great work, I have no worries about the future of the field. (Well, except for those who try to claim it’s woefully deficient because epigenetics!)

Pinker’s new book out tomorrow, previewed in the Guardian and the WSJ

February 12, 2018 • 11:45 am

Yes, tomorrow is the release of Steve Pinker’s new book , Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason Science, Humanism, and Progress, which is already at #48 on Amazon. I gave a preview of it here, noting that Bill Gates called it “my new favorite book of all time,” replacing Steve’s earlier book, The Better Angels of our Nature. Gates had read a prepublication copy, and his encomium surely boosted sales. But this book is destined to be a best seller, and I’m glad.

I’m glad because it promotes humanism, science, rationality, and progress, and claims that faith and dogma (i.e., religion) don’t promote social progress. You can see this in two precis of the book that Steve has written for the Guardian and for the Wall Street Journal. (The former is free; the latter is behind a paywall but judicious inquiry might yield a pdf). I now have a prepublication copy too (Steve and I have the same editor at Viking/Penguin/Random House), and I’ve just skimmed it quickly. It appears from the two articles, and from what I’ve skimmed, that this is the logical successor to Better Angels. While the earlier book documented that, in fact, most indices of social well being (violence, child mortality, longevity, health, accidents, and so on) have improved over the last few hundred years, Enlightenment Now delves into the reasons for that improvement. And the reasons are the implementation of Enlightenment values.

I’ll give a few excepts from the Guardian piece, “Reason is non-negotiable” to show the book’s tenor (my emphasis):

What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”, its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority. Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is: “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed. The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th. Provoked by challenges to conventional wisdom from science and exploration, mindful of the bloodshed of recent wars of religion, and abetted by the easy movement of ideas and people, the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress.

. . . If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

Steve’s atheism, while omnipresent, is never the overriding theme of his work, though it’s an important explanation of what holds back the implementation of Enlightenment values.  He then goes on to show how reason, science, and humanism have produced progress, promoting a salubrious morality, economic advance, peace, empathy and “niceness”. (The Wall Street Journal piece, called “The Enlightenment is Working“, is more a documentation of this progress using statistics.

 

I’ll be reading this after I finish Adam Rutherford’s book on human genetics. If you read Better Angels and liked it, then you’ll have to read its sequel. If you haven’t read Better Angels, get both books and read them. That’s a lot of pages, but it’s worth it.