Update on the spider soap opera (no photos)

Yeesh, but a lot of people send me piteous complaints if I post a photo of my little spider friends, so from now on I’ll either confine them below the fold, or as in this case, not have any photographs at all. I still want to give an occasional status, though.

So my tiny colony currently consists of four females and one male spider.

As I last mentioned, Sara is expecting — she was impregnated by some unknown wild male before I brought her into the lab. She’s got a voracious appetite and has sucked two crickets dry in the last 5 days.

Amanda has also been eating well. Last time, I introduced her to our one male, Harry, who was not at all subtle and jumped right on her. She didn’t seem to mind, since Harry survived the encounter.

Since Harry was so eager, I moved him to Emma‘s vial. He’s still there, still alive, but kind of curled up and looking exhausted. Emma is looking great, and was smacking her chelicerae over a fresh cricket corpse.

Xena — poor Xena, I’ve been worried about her. She doesn’t eat. There’s a juicy cricket wandering about in her vial, taunting her, and she does nothing. But today Xena made an egg sac! I guess she had her priorities.

The Nameless Swarm of spiderlings seem to be doing well. I throw a few fruit flies into their dish, and a few hours later they’re all dead. I’m going to have to clean up the charnel chaos of their home tomorrow — it’s littered with the dessicated husks of their victims. The babies are so cute.

So that’s 5 adults and three egg sacs in less than two weeks, and an uncountable horde of spiderlings. That’s a pretty good volume of animals spawned fairly quickly, which is good news for my interest in getting embryos.

I’m optimistic that I’ll have a reliably propagating colony soon, if mortality isn’t too high among the spiderlings (I’ve read that there is a lot of death to come, but there are so many I’m hoping I’ll get plenty surviving to adulthood).

I’m impressed at how easy these are to raise, so far. You ought to try it!

Owning the libs, a tale in three acts

Nike is coopting Colin Kaepernick’s protest by featuring him in an ad. It makes me slightly queasy to see Big Capitalism buying the face of a cause, but I’m not going to argue about that. Instead, the Trumpsters are losing their shit. They’re throwing away or setting their Nike clothing and shoes on fire in protest.

Which is fine — protesting is a great old tradition, they should publicly protest ideas they oppose. Kinda like how Kaepernick has been doing. So they’re protesting a guy protesting for protesting by protesting, and the irony is escaping them, as is the fact that destroying a product you’ve already purchased isn’t exactly doing Nike any harm.

It’s just stupid.

How stupid? Well, this one guy made it even stupider.

He announces his intent to burn his shoes. There’s some foreshadowing about what is to come here.

He asks everyone to retweet his principled act of bravery. OK! Happy to oblige! Uh, guy, shouldn’t you take the shoes off before you set them on fire?

Then, in the third act, the predictable outcome. You can guess where this is going. I’m putting this photo below the fold, because it is a bit grisly. He’s in the hospital now.

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The movie this week is…BlacKkKlansman

First, though, a little advertisement: starting this weekend, the Morris Theatre is holding the Prairie Light Film Festival, a whole week with a rotating roster of good movies, movies I’ve wanted to see, but had low expectations that they’d ever play in small town rural Minnesota. It’s a small, mostly white and conservative town, and we’ve long had this single screen movie theater that has had to play it safe with their choices if they want to be profitable, and that means we get movies that will appeal to college students or the general community, without a lot of risk-taking. For instance, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was the sole movie being shown for about a month a few years ago. Enough said.

So now we’ve got this crazy wild festival coming up, and we’ve got a second screen, so finally the theater can show movies with narrower appeal, like BlacKkKlansman. Once upon a time, I would have estimated the chance of a Spike Lee film being shown in Morris as negligible — not because the theater management wouldn’t have liked to, but because they needed movies with broad appeal to the Morris audience. But now they can, and I am so happy.

BlacKkKlansman is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Right at the top of my list. Great acting, amazing story, strong and relevant theme, beautifully structured. I had no idea how they were going to pull of the central conceit of the story — a black man joins the KKK — but the way it was done, that there were two undercover cops using the same name, and it was the white guy, Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, who would appear at Klan meetings, while the black guy, John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, would manage everything over the phone, worked well. It also worked well because it gave both Flip and Ron opportunities to grow in the roles they were playing. Driver was great as a Jew who realizes that this is his battle, too.

But I have to say something about the end of the movie. It was the most powerful gut punch I’ve ever experienced at a movie. So below the fold is a kind of a spoiler — I’m not going to give away any details of the plot, but I am going to say a few things about the structure of the ending.

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Don’t do this

I am not deep in the lore of statistics, but even I find this appalling.

No, really? And this is published in Nature, and not one reviewer threw a flag on the play? I had to double-check.

Yep, there it is. Wow. Why even bother with statistics if you’re just going to do the experiment until you get the answer you want?

Here, go read this: A Tutorial on Hunting Statistical Significance by Chasing N.

Brooks Mythicists have a point

Well, now I’m confused. It turns out that the historicity of the Bush years can be reasonably called into question.

Of course as every high-school student knows, almost all of the original digital and analog records of the Guild of Pundits during that period were destroyed during the Great Discontinuity — the early 21st century’s Elite media’s last ditch effort to evade accountability for their crimes. And what few fragments we do have from that time come down to us filtered through the fun-house mirrors of surviving backups of the “fuckingblogs”.

In particular, one figure stands out as implausible: David Brooks.

And as the original events have been sifted and re-sifted by popular culture, fan fiction and hermeneutics, the academic world has more-or-less evenly divided itself into two, irreconcilable orthodoxies — the Historical Brooks versus the Fictional Brooks — each of which finds strong support for its own theory in the literature itself.

Based on the radically divergent accounts of writings attributed to him during a single decade, roughly half of all professional media historians — The Historicals — subscribe to theory that “David Brooks” in an amalgamation of several real but wildly different people. The other half — The Fictionals — maintain that since so much of what he was alleged to have written was so obviously false and absurd, “David Brooks” had to be a literary contrivance: something analogous to Poe’s nameless recounter of “The Telltale Heart” or Greta Van Sustern — a fictional narrator whose own pathological unreliability is integral to the story.

Both sides have good arguments.

Obviously, (the Historicals conclude) like “Alan Smithee” or “Tom Freed Man”, “David Brooks” must have been some sort of collective pen-name behind which dregs of the Punditry Guild could shout all kinds of shameful craziness while avoiding the professional consequences of saying remarkably stupid thing in public.

But (the Fictionals rejoin very effectively) it is the very ludicrousness of “David Brooks”‘s “opinions” which argue most strongly against it being the name — or pseudonym — of any real person or persons. Consider that, in order to make the argument that the United States government is incapable of competently operating a national health-care system with mandates, “David Brooks” simply ignores the fact that the United States government of that era was already operating a very efficient and beloved national health-care system (with mandates!) which was known as Medicare and, at the time, had over 49 million beneficiaries.

I don’t know how to decide. This might help: a fellow atheist and trained historian, Eddie Marcus, contacted me and offered to explain how historians make decisions about the historicity of a different weird, unbelievable person, Jesus. I’m willing to listen — it might help me make up my mind about this bizarre “David Brooks” character — so we’re doing a hangout on Wednesday at 7am Central time, or 8pm Perth time (the hour is a compromise to find a reasonable time when both of us are awake). I’d say “Join us”, but I think that’s only going to reasonably apply to Australians and Asians. So, “Join us, Australians! Half of us will be speaking English properly!” The rest of you can tune in after it’s all over.

A great loss to the world

Brazil has suffered a terrible loss.

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20m items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

Imagine if the Smithsonian burned down. It’s not replaceable.

The media are reporting that the cause of this fire was neglect — the museum had “fallen into disrepair”, and that it had only recently managed to land support for a fire prevention project. I might be more favorable to conservatives if they were actually interested in preserving what the nation has, and less interested in looting what we’ve got to benefit the wealthy (I know nothing about the leanings of the Brazilian government; this is a general statement about the neglect I see when conservatives are in power in my country.)

So many bad arguments for veganism…

I say this as someone with a great deal of sympathy for veganism, who has been progressively cutting more and more meat out of his diet, but this video that I’m seeing so many people rave about is bad. Bad arguments. Bad ideas. Ick. Made me want to kill a cow and eat its heart raw (no, not really, I’m still committed to vegetarianism as a personal choice).

The naturalistic fallacy is always a fallacy, and that’s where this thing goes wrong. The first half is entirely an appeal to a false idea of what is “natural”.

All the natural animal eaters in the wild kill their prey using what they are biologically given. He presents them with a thought experiment: if he brings in a live pig, could the audience kill it with their bare hands? That they can’t (actually, they probably could, but it would be messy and ugly and people would be hurt, too) is evidence that killing animals isn’t “natural”. Nonsense. Hominins have been using tools for millions of years; we have physically co-evolved with tool use. When the Trumpopocalypse comes, and civilization collapses, what are the survivors going to do? They’re going to sharpen sticks and pick up rocks. It’s what we “naturally” do.

We are not effective predators. Well, fuck, that’s just stupid. Ask all the animals we’ve hunted…oh, wait, you can’t, because they’re all dead.

Are you going to eat the raw meat? No, I’m going to cook it. We’ve been using fire since the days of Homo erectus, and the consumption of processed foods has almost certainly contributed to our morphology — our small teeth and faces. Fire is “natural”. In the rubble of the Trumpopocalypse, people will be rubbing two sticks together so they can roast the cockroaches they catch.

Are you going to eat the organs? All that nasty stuff? Uh, yes? It’s not nasty. I’ve eaten livers and pancreases and intestines and brains and hearts and tongues. It really depends on what cuisine you’ve been brought up with whether you find it repulsive or not. Again, he’s mistaking a conditioned cultural response with what is “natural”. I once saw my grandmother bring a bucket of leftover scraps from a slaughterhouse into the kitchen. She could make good meals out of offal. Offal isn’t awful if you’ve been brought up with it.

When people see these parts of animals, they always say “it puts them off their food”. Oh, it’s yucky and bloody and unfamiliar. It’ll make you nauseated. I sympathize, a little bit. People are all different, and it depends on what you’ve been brought up with. Most of us don’t experience the whole gory splatterfest of processing dead animals, so you get freaked out about it, and that’s OK — but it’s not about what’s natural, it’s about what you’re acculturated to.

This is really just an appeal to the emotions.

One of the reasons I do most of the cooking at home is that my wife does not want to deal with blood and dead animals. Once, when we were first married, I had a plan to cook some Cornish game hens for dinner, and I got held up late at work, so I called my wife and asked her to get them ready and into the oven, and gave her instructions. I came home to find her in tears and practically gagging, and obviously with no appetite at all. I’m comfortable with blood and guts and the “nasty stuff”. I’m not bothered at all. (This argument is irrelevant now that we’ve mostly switched to vegetarian meals, but it continues out of historical precedent.)

If you were naturally meant to eat animals, not only would you be able to watch them being killed, you’d be able to kill them yourself. OK, then: I have killed animals. I’ve gutted them afterwards, cooked them, and eaten them with great pleasure. I guess by this argument that I am naturally meant to eat animals. Maybe I should introduce him to Ed Brayton, who not only has no qualms upon seeing an eviscerated hunk of cow, he starts drooling (it could be he’s an atavism.)

I’m also living out in farm country. These are people who are accustomed to the idea of going out to the chicken yard with a hatchet and coming back with dinner. They look at these kinds of arguments for vegetarianism like the speaker has suddenly grown two heads…this just makes no sense at all.

Now once this guy leaves his “natural” argument, I think he starts making good points. I agree with what he says next.

You see a pig abused, killed, and beaten in front of you. Do you object? There is no justification for abuse. So let’s take that off the table. Can we justify killing a large mammal like a pig for food? I could turn the “natural” argument right around on him: that’s what our ancestors have been doing for millions of years, so to argue suddenly that in these last few generations our past behavior has become abominable is “unnatural”. In the ruins of our crumbling civilization, the ones who will survive are those who can slaughter a squirrel or the family dog for a meal.

But also, I can respect the personal decision that no, killing a conscious animal is immoral. Making an animal suffer so we can extract milk or eggs from it is immoral. We’re starting to get on tricky ground here, though, because you could argue that our existence, especially in our current numbers, is totally immoral, because we sustain ourselves with the suffering of other organisms. I can see that, but I have to make a moral compromise, and make an effort to minimize harm, while aware that I can’t totally end it.

Let’s say that pig being abused in front of you is now being abused behind a wall, where you can no longer see them. Does that now make it moral? Oh, these damn philosophers with their tricksy questions! No, it doesn’t make it moral, and if your moral framework says that killing and eating animals is wrong, you should be working to end all kinds of farming and slaughterhouse practices. You go, guy! I’ll just ask that you stop making dishonest arguments for your cause.

Now as a vegan I eat all the foods that I used to enjoy, but now I do so without harming animals. This is true. There are many vegan alternatives that you can turn to, and you don’t even need to use meat substitutes — plants taste good. Especially when you use “unnatural” practices like cooking them, and did you know that if you gave an audience a bushel of wheat that they wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to extract the protein to make seitan, and if they did, they’d need to use tools?

Going vegan encouraged me to reinvent the ways that I cooked. Yeah. I rediscovered spices when we started making vegetarian meals. And also fire. Did you know that raw potatoes taste terrible? It’s true! Our distant ancestors did all kinds of artificial processing of those tubers they were gathering out on the savannah. Every culture around the world has developed techniques for improving the flavor of those natural foods they collect, whether it’s a vegetarian curry or a Texas barbecue.

He does not make one argument that I find important: meat-eating is not a sustainable practice. There are so many of us on this planet that simply skimming off the top of the food chain is wasteful and inefficient and damaging to the ecosystem.