Back to the spider grind

I took a tour of my house this morning to see how the spiders were shaping up. I found lots, even more than I did last week. Some were familiar, like Attulus fasciger, who had captured a mosquito-like creature. Good work, young lady!

Of course there were lots of Salticus scenicus around.

The exciting but somewhat disappointing discovery was that Parasteatoda abounded — they’d colonized several inset corners of the house and areas around the downspouts, where they had good cover and great places to hide.

The disappointing part was my own failure: I couldn’t get a good picture of any of them! They were all living in little houses made of plant debris, and if I tapped on them to ask them to come out, they did a typical Parasteatoda thing: they’d immediately bungee straight down to the ground. They’re conveniently predictable when trying to catch them, but I just wanted to say hello and take a picture.
To see what I mean about the difficulty, I saved one photo of one tucked into a bit of dried flower petal, with just her blurry butt sticking out.

I’ve got 4 of these spider nests tagged now, and I’ll be back tomorrow and will try to get some better pictures. Except I think we’ve got thunderstorms predicted for Sunday…so maybe a little later.

You can see the photos, if you really want to, on Patreon or Instagram, as usual.

We’re all going to come out of this with new phobias

I’m starting to think I never want to be around people again, what with all their filthy, moist exhalations.

On the plus side, I’ve always wanted an excuse to wear a mask and cover this homely face. I look forward to the new support for industries that make fashionable face wear — I would like a formal mask for special occasions, a professional mask for work, and a wild & crazy mask for partying in the streets (alone, of course). I may also need a spider mask for those days I’m focused on arachnids, even though they tend not to sneeze.

Modern comic book history, in 3 minutes

As a person who mostly skipped any engagement with comic books in the 80s and 90s (my sons got into them a bit during that period), this short video seems to perfectly encapsulate my experience with them. Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane are shown creating a new superhero character while Stan Lee kibitzes. The amazing thing is how Lee zeroes in on the deficiencies of their creation — all flash and glitz, no story and no character — and closes with words of prophecy.

“The kids like it!”

Playing catch-up for a bit

After our long, long drive yesterday, I thought this would be a good day to rest and recover. I forgot that I’d brought Mary home. She was out in the garage at 7:30 fueling and oiling the lawn mower, eager to get to work cutting grass. I was not. I have more sedate plans.

  • I was up at 6 tinkering with computers. I’ve mentioned before that my Mac is on its last legs, with keys falling out and mysterious errors cropping up now and then, but the price of replacing it was prohibitive, especially since my disposable income, which wasn’t much to begin with, is flowing outwards to deal with legal debt. After a few days in my daughter’s Reality Distortion Field, in which she pointed out that I could get a high-end Linux machine for a thousand bucks less than my Mac upgrade, I decided to tinker. I installed the free Pop!_OS on an old Windows machine that I found intolerable — Windows is an ugly abomination — and brought it back to life. I’m going to work with it for a while to see if my old brain can readjust itself to use Unix instead of the MacOS, which I hate to say has become increasingly ugly over the years. I despise iTunes almost as much as I do Windows.

  • I’m going to spend some time in the lab this morning giving loving attention to my spiders, who have been neglected now for almost a week. Baby want a snackums? I have some nice flies for you.

  • I will obey my mistress after the spiders are made content. She has assigned me the task of cleaning out and sterilizing the car we spent 14 hours in yesterday. This may require fire.

  • I’ve got this working Raspberry Pi with a NOIR camera that we had set up to take pictures, and I’ve got this spider cage here at home, and now I have to figure out how to mount the camera above it at a reasonable distance that encompasses the whole field of view with reasonable resolution. Alternatively, I may have to build a dedicated cage of smaller size that will compromised between freedom of movement for the spider and adequate field dimensions for this camera. I’m thinking ring stands, tripods, hot glue, and popsicle sticks, because I’m focused on cheap and easy.

  • Mary has been looking at this bachelor pad I’ve been occupying with a glint in her eye. Who knows what she’ll order me to do next?

  • I’ve got some weekend cooking to do. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of garam masala in Morris, so I’d ordered a bunch of it online. Yes, I have a 5 lb bag of garam masala now, in case anyone needs to borrow a cup of it. I hope Mary likes curry.

The Panspermia Mafia strikes again!

A reader informed me that I was mentioned in a British magazine, and sent me a scan of the relevant bit. It’s not so much my brief mention that interested me, as that it’s another example of the Panspermia Mafia in action. It’s an article about a recently elected Conservative MP, Jamie Wallis, who has a science degree…or does he?

Dominic Cummings has bemoaned the fact that many MPs “did degrees such as English, history, and PPE. They operate with…little maths or science.” Thankfully, Dr Jamie Wallis, the new Conservative MP for Bridgend, is that rarest of things: an MP with not just a science degree, but a PhD in “astrobiology” to boot.

Where it gets interesting is that he obtained a PhD from, I presume, Cardiff University, which was NC Wickramasinghe’s former affiliation, although he has since ensconced himself at the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. There is reason to doubt that Wallis actually did the caliber of work we expect in a PhD thesis.

Completing a PhD while co-directing several companies is quite an achievement. Wallis’s thesis, “Evidence of Panspermia: From Astronomy to Meteorites”, is devoted to the niche and widely rejected theories of his supervisor, one NC Wickramasinghe. Notoriously, Wickramasinghe maintains not only that life on earth arrived on comets, but that organisms continue to regularly arrive by this method. (Just last week, he wrote to the Lancet helpfully suggesting the novel coronavirus COVID-19 arrived in China from space.)

Why does the Lancet, or any respectable journal, continue to publish crank letters from Wickramasinghe? But OK, I think it’s established that Wallis’s degree was somehow earned under the supervision of a well-known fringe kook, and that it’s questionable how much work he actually invested in the project, which sounds like some kind of review involving no independent research.

But why do I call this the Panspermia Mafia? They use their connections to promote a small family of fellow travelers.

Appropriately, given that the theory of cosmic panspermia is about origins, involvement with Wickramasinghe seems to be a Wallis family affair. A typical thesis might produce several publications. Wallis Jnr’s thesis lists an astonishing 21 with him as an author — mostly not in peer-reviewed journals — 16 of which include his dad in the author list. And of the eight publications that supposedly have been peer-reviewed, six are in the highly dubious Journal of Cosmology. Wickramasinghe is the “executive editor” for astrobiology for the journal, described by US scientist PZ Myers as the “ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics”.

Yeah, that’s about it — it’s so inbred that it relies on the one guy who has a name and connections but very little credibility, Wickramasinghe, to promote the members of his cabal in a roster of fake journals. This article didn’t examine them in detail, but I suspect that all 21 of the articles are rehashed, recycled, barely rewritten examples of frantic self-plagiarism. To say you got a degree with Wickramasinghe is the British equivalent of saying you’re a colleague of Kent Hovind.

Isn’t it nice that he provides a pipeline for Conservatives to claim they have the authority of science? Just in case you’re wondering, no, they don’t.

Whoa…Norma McCorvey confesses that it was all an act

Norma McCorvey, who fought for the right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade, and then flipped to crusade against abortion under the influence of evangelicals, flipped again before her death — she was bought and paid for by the Religious Right.

In the final third of director Nick Sweeney’s 79-minute documentary, featuring many end-of-life reflections from McCorvey—who grew up queer, poor, and was sexually abused by a family member her mother sent her to live with after leaving reform school—the former Jane Roe admits that her later turn to the anti-abortion camp as a born-again Christian was “all an act.”

“This is my deathbed confession,” she chuckles, sitting in a chair in her nursing home room, on oxygen. Sweeney asks McCorvey, “Did [the evangelicals] use you as a trophy?” “Of course,” she replies. “I was the Big Fish.” “Do you think you would say that you used them?” Sweeney responds. “Well,” says McCorvey, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say.” She even gives an example of her scripted anti-abortion lines. “I’m a good actress,” she points out. “Of course, I’m not acting now.”

The two jackhole Christians who ran the scam are both horrified, but split: one because the end justifies the means, the other because he actually has some moral principles.

Reverend Schenck, the much more reasonable of the two evangelical leaders featured in the film, also watches the confession and is taken aback. But he’s not surprised, and easily corroborates, saying, “I had never heard her say anything like this… But I knew what we were doing. And there were times when I was sure she knew. And I wondered, Is she playing us? What I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we’re playing her.” Reverend Schenck admits that McCorvey was “a target,” a “needy” person in need of love and protection, and that “as clergy,” people like Schenck and Benham were “used to those personalities” and thus easily able to exploit her weaknesses. He also confirms that she was “coached on what to say” in her anti-abortion speeches. Benham denies McCorvey was paid; Schenck insists she was, saying that “at a few points, she was actually on the payroll, as it were.” AKA Jane Roe finds documents disclosing at least $456,911 in “benevolent gifts” from the anti-abortion movement to McCorvey.

Reverend Benham then blurts out, “Yeah, but she chose to be used. That’s called work. That’s what you’re paid to be doing!” Schenck’s thinking is quite different: “For Christians like me, there is no more important or authoritative voice than Jesus,” he explains. “And he said, ‘What does it profit in the end if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?’ When you do what we did to Norma, you lose your soul.”

In fact, Reverend Schenck underlines his own conversion, which took place in the last decade: “I still identify as an evangelical, but I like to think of myself as lovingly critical of my community. I guess in some ways I’d like to use whatever years I have remaining to undo the damage that I did and that many movement leaders did on the pro-life side. I used to think that Roe v. Wade would never be overturned. I think Roe v. Wade could be overturned now. And I think the result of that would be chaos and pain. And to impose that kind of crisis on a woman is unthinkable.”

Fortunately, the pro-choice cause does not rely on the bought testimony of individuals, but on the autonomy of all women.