Joe Biden, making promises he won’t keep

Do we really want a delusional old liar in the presidency again? Joe Biden is making ridiculous claims.

Speaking at a campaign stop in Ottumwa, Iowa, on Tuesday he discussed losing loved ones before making his promise.

“A lot of you understand what loss is and when loss occurs, you know that people come up to you and tell you ‘I understand’ if you lose a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter, a family member,” he said. “That’s why I’ve worked so hard in my career to make sure that — I promise you if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America, we’re gonna cure cancer.”

No, we’re not.

I understand that cancer is an important personal issue to him, and I would approve of a candidate promising to invest more in biomedical research. If he had actually listened to doctors, if he had any understanding of cancer at all, he’d know that cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a moving target with a billion alternative strategies for evading treatment, and that by its very nature isn’t going to be susceptible to a magic bullet approach. It requires incremental improvements in management and treatment and diagnosis, and even then, sometimes the best doctors can offer is going to fail. He is promising snake oil. He isn’t paying attention to the advisors he ought to be listening to. He sure as hell isn’t personally going to deliver on that promise.

He might as well stand up on that podium and promise that he’s going to cure all viral diseases, eradicate all bacteria, end global climate change, end world hunger, emerge victorious from all wars, and colonize Mars, all between the years 2020 and 2028. No, he’s not. He looks stupid and glib and shallow doing it, too.

I wasn’t going to vote for him in the primaries anyway, but he’s doing his damnedest to make it difficult to vote for him if he wins the Democratic nomination. Which I earnestly hope he doesn’t.

Everything wrong with Twitter in one story

In their mad flailing about to defeat the bad PR about how their site is a haven for racists and misogynists, while trying carefully to avoid alienating anyone who might be bringing them buckets of money, Twitter managed to ban David Neiwert. You know, the David Neiwert, the journalist who has been carefully documenting the rise of the rabid right for decades, who is no friend to these extremists?

Neiwert shared with The Daily Beast the appeal he sent to Twitter:

“My account was suspended because of the photo of the cover of my book in my profile. This book, ‘Alt-America,’ is a history of the rise of the radical right in the United States over the past 30 years. It naturally has an illustration featuring KKK hoods because that is its subject. I am one of the nation’s leading experts on this subject, and it is insane that you would suspend my account because of this photo. I refuse to remove it on principle.”

Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump was published in 2017 and chronicled the trajectory of far-right and white supremacist groups since the 1990s. Neiwert had used the cover illustration on his Twitter profile without trouble since the book was published.

The problem here is that Twitter insists on implementing the cheapest, most superficial, most easily gamed methods to sniff out bad actors on their medium, meaning that the dishonest thrive and the forthright are silenced. This is not a good sign that they’re getting a grip on the infection they’ve enabled.

I wonder if I’ll get banned for posting the same cover image?

I challenge the Queen of England to battle!

Justin Bieber ludicrously challenged Tom Cruise to a battle…so it’s a thing now. You have to pick a famous person who is 31 years older than you to a fight. That’s getting a bit tricky in my case, since I’ve got to find someone who is 93 years old. Fortunately, I have a contender: Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. She’s 93 years old, exactly right.

I think I can take her. Pretty sure, anyway. If I win in a trial by combat, do I get to take over her throne?

New spider housing!

I got some excellent suggestions from Nicholas DiRienzo for raising spiders, which is why it’s good to get information online, and also why I’m going to the American Arachnology Society conference this weekend. You can get started with reading stuff, but there’s no substitute for hearing it straight from the experts.

We checked out the couples we’d put together in larger spaces yesterday, and sadly, I caught one in the act of cannibalism…poor guy. We separated them. Then I rummaged in my collection of zebrafish containers, and found some 5.7L Sterilyte containers, a bit smaller than Dr DiRienzo recommended, but we’ll give them a try. We moved a few females into them right away so they can start getting used to the expanded digs. We’re going to also add some cardboard liners, once we find a box that fits.

I was initially daunted about the space required — it was appealing to just have oodles of spiders in a small incubator — but once I started stacking these things, I realized I could pack maybe as many as 50 females into the space I’d previously used for my zebrafish setup. Sorry, fishies, it’s now an arachnid facility.

My summer student, Preston Fifarek, has wisely chosen to name the female spiders after characters from Game of Thrones. Males are going to get Lord of the Rings names. I’ll be interested to see how well Cersei takes to Bilbo.

Do you feel the fear of Christ yet?

The Legion of St Ambrose looks like a gang of video game cosplayers. They threaten to dab you.

They also have some kind of manifesto online. It’s the usual theocratic noise: church schooling, patriarchy, mandatory Christianity, anti-“bankers” (we all know what they mean by that) and of course, white nationalism.

An interesting twist: they’re “environmental”, meaning they want to ban pesticides, GMOs, and factory farming. They also think healthcare should be a right, but they also want to emphasize “natural” medicines. No more private prisons, either, but also no abortions, ever.

It’s a novel evolution of Christian conservatism. The funny costumes make it hard to take them seriously, though.

My day is all booked up already

I have plans, so many plans.

First, I’m going into the lab to examine yesterday’s handiwork. We attempted to breed two pairs of spiders yesterday, moving them into two different kinds of larger chambers. My concern is that the vials we keep them in are too small for two spiders and that one of the reasons I’m seeing so much cannibalism of the males is because of overcrowding. If all goes well, I’ll find two females and two live males today. If that works, I’m going to turn my incubator into a fornucopia and pair up all the males with mates. I’d like, for a change, to have more embryos than I know what to do with.

Then we’re surveying some more garages. I’ve arbitrarily set a one week window for data collection in June, so that will be done tomorrow.

This afternoon I have to transcribe all the data into my computer — right now I’ve got a pile of folders and scribblings on paper for each site. I’m keeping paper records of everything (hey, election officials — it’s a good idea!), but I’ve got to get it organized in one place so I can wrap my head around it.

One of the things I have to sort out is some of the bigger picture data. I’m being scrupulous about data privacy — every site is encoded on a master list, and then the individual site data is stored without direct reference to the homeowners (which is good, I planned ahead thinking people might not want it known how many spiders occupy their property), but now I’m seeing glimmerings of interesting spatial distributions of species. I might want to make a map at some point.

In some ways, the data so far is kind of boring. Because we restricted ourselves to one narrow kind of environment, garages and sheds, we’re seeing the same beasties everywhere: Pholcus and Steatoda and Parasteatoda. That’s good for our sanity, because we’re brand new at this spider game, so reducing the number of taxa we have to master simplifies everything. We know, though, that there are hundreds of species around here, and we only occasionally see an orb weaver or funnel web spider or ground spider in these dusty musty cobwebby garages. We might want to think about sampling other sites in the future.

For instance, houses around Lake Crystal here in town have been stunning when we walk up to knock on the front door — the houses are covered in webs, there are swarms of mosquitos and mayflies everywhere, we start out convinced that this place is going to a time-consuming nightmare to sort out. Then we walk into the garage, and dang, it’s nothing but Theridiidae and Pholcidae again, and not particularly rich in them, either. We’re focused on these sheltered mini-environments while there’s a riot going on outside. Maybe at some point, if I get a student interested in that sort of thing, we’ll just stake out an area on the lakeshore and go centimeter by centimeter through that more complex space.

Right now, though, just the relationships between these few species in our limited environment are going to take a while to puzzle out. Garages are either infested with Pholcus or Parasteatoda, but mixed distributions are less common. Will we see shifts over the summer? Do the pholcids, known predators of other spiders, gradually take over? Is there something in the environment that favors one species over another?

We’re also seeing some interesting granularity in the species distribution, which is one reason I’m thinking of mapping. We find Parasteatoda tepidariorum everywhere, it’s probably the most common spider in these sites. But then we found one house that was all S. triangularis, and two widely separated houses with lots of S. borealis. Just chance? Are there little enclaves of these species, like ethnic neighborhoods, that persist over time? If we go door-knocking and check other houses in these neighborhoods, will we find larger patterns?

I haven’t even started on the lab studies. Once we get steady production of embryos, we’re going to start with some simple studies of the effect of temperature on rate of development, seeing if we can induce diapause, that sort of thing, all with the aim of figuring out how spiders survive living in a place where temperatures drop to -20°C every winter. My summer months are split with one week of taxonomic studies to three weeks in the lab, so that’s actually going to take up more of our time soon.

I feel like I’m getting sucked down into a spider hole. It’s delightful! I recommend it! You should all join us down here!

You think spiders are weird? At least I’m not working on turkeys.

Those birds are creepy.

They began with a taxidermically prepared female turkey model and a pen of active males. In order to learn what specifically gets a turkey visually interested in making more turkeys, the two men slowly removed parts of the turkey model, one by one. They detached the feet, the wings, and eventually the entire body of the taxidermied turkey until the stick-mounted head and neck, held like the grimmest puppet, remained.

In their paper “Stimulae Eliciting Sexual Behavior” the scientists write: “Male turkeys presented a body without the head displayed but did not mount. Presenting the head alone (upright) released display behavior followed by ‘mounting’ and copulatory movements immediately posterior to the head.”

That’s a bit of evidence that bozo defending the missionary position didn’t consider. See? Turkey faces are a potent visual stimulus to other turkeys, even when decapitated and impaled on a stick.

I don’t understand how non-vegetarians can even bear to eat those things.

My house: ground zero in the Northern Empire of Spiders

We were out spider-huntin’ again today, adding more data to the collection, and finding this Steatoda, which is about as big as they get. We’ve captured a couple of representatives of this species now, but they’re all female.

We limit the number we capture to one or two a day, because we don’t want to perturb the local populations too much. I’m only planning to breed Parasteatoda tepidariorum, though, so I’m going to have to do something with the other species we find…I’m probably going to release them all at my house, since I did so much collecting here that the population is hopelessly messed up already, which may turn my house into a weird little hotbed of exotic spider diversity.

I wonder if that will increase the property value? It should.