No, really, I just want to contribute to the advancement of science.
No, really, I just want to contribute to the advancement of science.
…Geoffrey Rush! It’s a tough field of contenders with a lot of really weasely apologies out there, but Rush went all out for the win. Rush treated his co-star in a play, Yael Stone, to the spectacle of taking off his clothes and dancing naked in front of her, spying on her in the shower with a mirror, and sending sexualized text messages to her, and has now offered up this stunning “apology” for his actions:
Clearly Yael has been upset on occasion by the spirited enthusiasm I generally bring to my work. I sincerely and deeply regret if I have caused her any distress. This, most certainly, has never been my intention.
I’m sort of impressed. That’s a degree of obliviousness that even I, in my cosseted male whiteness, couldn’t even aspire to. I’ll have to remember that “spirited enthusiasm” is a perfectly acceptable synonym for “sexual harassment”.
Travis Pangburn has acquired a bad reputation for stiffing attendees and speakers at his traveling alt-light ‘philosophy’ show, but it turns out he also stiffed children’s entertainers, like Sharon, (Lois), and Bram (Lois died a few years ago, so she’s safe, unless Trav is digging up her grave for valuables now). Maybe you didn’t have kids so you have no idea who they are, but if you do, all I have to do is say “skinnamarinky dinky dink” to infect you with an earworm.
Anyway, Sharon and Bram are out $15,000. Here’s Pangburn’s response:
Asked why he didn’t pay the agreed-upon price to Sharon and Bram, he wrote, “It sucks. I am and forever will be huge fans of Sharon and Bram. The fact that the shows didn’t bring in enough to cover their full fee was not expected and it was highly unfortunate.”
You know, Sharon and Bram lost money on those gigs, because they felt responsible and an obligation to pay their crew and the venues out of their own pocket, despite the fact that they did their job and it was their promoter who screwed up, making promises he couldn’t keep. Pangburn, on the other hand, blames the crowds and defaults on his obligations.
Yeah, it sucks. The “it” in this case refers to Travis Pangburn.
Wow. Alex McNabb is the personification of the worst smug assholes ever. He’s an EMT who also moonlights on the Daily Shoah, a blatantly racist, anti-semitic, neo-Nazi site, and he makes ‘jokes’ about the black citizens he is supposed to treat, calling them “gorillas”, “dindus”, “Harambe”, etc., and also joked about terrorizing a black child with a large gauge hypodermic needle.
Listen to his excuses:
And jesus fuck but he is so damn smug, for a guy mindlessly parroting shitlord noise. He cheerfully admits to making all of these slurs, and just excuses them because he thinks they’re funny, and his audience of assholes think it’s funny.
Also, he works for something called the “JEB Stuart Volunteer Rescue Squad” (or did, he’s an unpaid leave). So the black people in that Virginia county have to rely on emergency services named after a Confederate general? I can see where the problem starts.
I am totally confused now. Tammy Bruce is on Fox News with Tucker Carlson arguing that gingerbread cookies are obviously male.
Tammy Bruce says cookies have a gender and "obviously they're men" pic.twitter.com/n7NWEzQrJc
— Madeline (@peltzmadeline) December 19, 2018
So, uh…they have penises? Or Y chromosomes? Or higher testosterone levels? Those are the usual criteria these loons use to argue for the inviolability and absolute rigidity of the male/female binary. Cookies don’t have any of those.
Are they finally admitting that gender is a social construct, that in the absence of biological markers they get to dictate by convention what sex a piece of baked dough is?
Also, Tucker Carlson has been spiritually neutered. But we all already knew that.
Oh, the nerdity of it all. I just read about a discussion of how spider-aliens would survive in space. This is my kind of thought-experiment!
In my stellar empire, the sapient life of the home world are arachnids. Due to an oxygen-heavy world with certain evolutionary characteristics, spider-like beings developed intelligence and formed society, leading them (eventually) to start looking toward the stars. This led to the development of space suits for the pioneering arachnid astronauts.
What would these look like? How would space suits be differently designed to support arachnids?
Let us posit that the arachnids are roughly 4 feet from “spinneret” to fangs. Their legs are large enough to support them (I don’t know what that is). They’re light compared to us (maybe 25 pounds at the heaviest – bear with me on the whole square cube law deal). They have roughly equivalent technology levels to ourselves at the time of our first missions into the stars.
Just by coincidence, I’ve been reading up on spider physiology recently, so this piqued my interest. Most of the answers in that thread are pretty good.
I’d first have to state a caveat: multi-legged alien beings evolving on a distant planet will not be spiders. It’s unfair to compare limitations and abilities that they have to those of terrestrial spiders — they aren’t related! Just blowing up an Earth spider to 1.2 meters long is not a valid comparison. But OK, let’s play a game and imagine an alien “spider” that evolved from an ancestor living in a similar niche to that of our spiders. Traits that are probably relevant are:
It’s a fun exercise, but if we ever find such a creature I suspect it will have less similarity to our spiders than we humans do to an acorn worm, so much of the speculation is moot.
Real spiders are more interesting. As I said, I’ve been reading up on spider physiology, so here’s a diagram of the main elements of the spider circulatory system (“h” marks the heart, on the dorsal side of the abdomen.)
That’s the cartoon version — here’s a resin cast of the full circulatory network of the opisthosoma of Cupiennius. It blows me away that they were able to do this — Cupiennius is fairly large as spiders go, but still pretty tiny.
Even more impressively, people have measured the blood pressure in the spider circulatory system — no, not with an itty-bitty sphygmomanometer. I suspect they used optical methods to visualize pressure changes, but that’s a paper I haven’t tracked down yet.
Systole and diastole are still valid concepts in a spider. In case you were interested, their hearts beat at a rate of 9 to 125 beats per minute. That’s quite a range, but as I mentioned above, one of the challenges is a highly variable metabolic rate.
Ultimately, though, if you’re going to design an SF “spider”-like alien, you shouldn’t be constrained by the form and physiology of terrestrial spiders. A homeothermic creature with an endoskeleton, but with a bunch of limbs and eyes and a sclerotized cuticle, and maybe some funky spiky complex mouthparts, is going to look enough like a spider to Zapp Brannigan that that’s what he’s going to call it anyway.
Schmitz A (2016) Respiration in spiders (Araneae). Journal of Comparative Physiology B 186(4):403–415.
Wirkner CS, Huckstorf K (2013) The Circulatory System of Spiders. In: Nentwig W. (eds) Spider Ecophysiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
One of the advantages of living in a tiny rural town is that I really don’t worry much about having packages stolen off my porch — I did once have a package fail to show up on time, and we wondered what had happened to it. It turned out that a new deliveryperson had put it on our front step — we almost never use our front door, preferring the door that opens up to the driveway and has a kind of mud room (do houses in other parts of the country have mud rooms?), so we just didn’t see it. It sat there in plain sight to anyone passing by on College Avenue for about a month, getting rained on. You could have stolen it and we wouldn’t have even noticed.
I understand it’s a bigger problem in the suburbs of big cities, and can see how it would be infuriating, especially around this time of year. This one guy took an extreme approach to handling it, though, building a combination glitter bomb/stink bomb with a GPS and multiple recording cameras to catch people in the act of theft.
I guess I’m supposed to be impressed with the elaborate, over-engineered contraption, but what struck me most was the thieves — these were ordinary people who would just casually rob others with no qualms at all. Multiple people. Not organized rings of criminals, just passers-by who would steal from their neighbors without regret, people with nice cars and nice homes. What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t your mothers teach you anything?
That’s a rather fundamental lesson for scientists: do not take shortcuts with the data. It completely corrupts all your conclusions, makes your entire history suspect, and will get you fired.
A tenured biology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was fired Friday, a rare punishment that essentially means a career death sentence in higher education and that has happened only once before at the state’s flagship public university.
Fei Wang, an associate professor of cell and molecular biology, was terminated following a special meeting of university trustees Friday, concluding a yearslong review of his work. Board members determined that Wang had fabricated and falsified scientific data in grant applications to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
You will also get zero sympathy from your colleagues.
“Prof. Wang is without question a highly intelligent, likable, and charismatic scientist,” trustees wrote in its report, released Friday. “However, the record supporting his fabrication of data and falsification of laboratory results, his submission of mouse cells rather than human cells in his data, his failure to mentor and supervise his students is overwhelming and beyond unacceptable. Prof. Wang’s misconduct has already required the university to return substantial sums of research funds to the federal government.”
He made them return grant money? He just lost any friends he might have had in the administration.
The latest numbers for attendance for the Ark Park are in, and as one might expect, show a steady decline.
This year in November 2018 the Ark Encounter sold 40,193 tickets.
Last year, November 2017, the Ark Encounter sold 51,914 tickets.About -20% from the previous year, eh?
A nightmare for Ken Ham, but it is entirely possible that hoards of 4 year olds are overwhelming the place, brought by their lifetime member parents or guardians.
I can’t wait to see what winter months bring. It might be financially wise to close the place for January and February, but Ken Ham can’t lose face by doing such a thing.
Here are all previous numbers since the safety tax began, for your convenience.
2017:
July: 142,626 (Safety Fee amount: $71,313.00)
August: 106,161 ($53,080.50)
September: 83,330 ($41,665.00)
October: 93,659 ($46,829.50)
November: 51,914 ($25,957.00)
December: 36,472 ($18,236.00)2018:
January: 13,250 ($6,625.00)
February: 17,961 ($8,980.50)
March: 62,251 ($31,125.50)
April: 67,613 ($33,806.50)
May: 73,353 ($36,676.50)
June: 113,901 ($56,950.50)
July: 135,922 ($67,961.00)
August: 98,106 ($49,053.00)
September: 69,207 ($34,603.50)
October: 89,434 ($44,717.00)
A few words of caution in interpreting these numbers. The Ark Park is absurdly overpriced, and Ken Ham is raking in a heck of a lot of profit…so the numbers would probably have to drop a lot more before he goes in the red. Also, the numbers come from reported attendance, used to calculate a safety fee or tax to the city of Williamsburg. Ham is such a venal little toad I wouldn’t be surprised if he intentionally under-reports (if he can) to save a little money.
I’m also unsurprised. Any theme park will have a drop off in attendance after the shiny newness wears off. 20% in a year, though…ouch. AiG is probably frantically trying to think of new ways to spark interest in their ridiculous young-Earth pretense.
I recommend that they should jump on the flat-earth, no moon-landings, anti-vaxx bandwagon. There’s no end of gullible people in that crowd. They won’t bat an eye at the claim that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old.
Everyone was raving about this movie, so I walked into it with elevated expectations, which is usually the kiss of death. But it wasn’t! Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was excellent! It has an interesting, complex story without relying on the “Villains aiming to destroy the world!” trope — even the primary bad guy, the Kingpin, had a believable motive.
But best of all was the artwork. This was a comic book movie that was not afraid to be a comic book movie, stealing comic book styles and comic book art and comic book plots, and then reveling in the freedom of computer-assisted animation. It just flies along playing visual games in a way that highlighted the story. It’s also damned optimistic, and lately we really need that occasional taste of escapism.
I went alone to the theater, because when I told my wife it was a super-hero movie, she was turned off and uninterested. It’s too bad, because she missed out, and I think she probably would have enjoyed it, too. Maybe when it comes to Netflix…