This is an odd video to go “viral”

I don’t get it. It’s a half-minute long video of a black widow hanging from a bit of silk, twirling about randomly (it’s below the fold if you want to see it). It’s a pretty animal, but the behavior is strange. I’ve never seen my related theridiidae do this. They’re either in repose, waiting for their next meal, or moving efficiently and purposefully to, for instance, add to their cobweb, or attack some prey, or scurry to a safe corner. Just dangling from a single thread, that’s weird, and makes me wonder about the context. Is she sick? Has she been traumatized?

If that’s all it takes to go viral, I clearly need to get into the lab and make videos of spiders doing interesting things.

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I will never understand what’s going on in the UK

I will also never understand what’s going on in the US. So, after years of incompetence and corruption, the one thing that might crash the insane conservative party in the UK is…a Christmas party?

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing calls to resign over reports that members of his staff attended a Christmas party last year while the country was in lockdown.

The Daily Mirror newspaper reported that the party took place on Dec. 18, 2020, which would have been illegal under the coronavirus restrictions in place at the time. Johnson has denied the allegation.

The aftermath has already brought down one party official.

In the video, the prime minister’s press secretary and other staff members can be seen holding a mock press conference, discussing how they would respond to allegations that Downing Street had held a Christmas party.

“It wasn’t a party, it was cheese and wine,” one person can be heard saying, prompting laughs across the room. The leaked video prompted fury from opposition lawmakers and residents alike.

Allegra Stratton, the staff member seen in the video, resigned from her post on Wednesday.

The party of Brexit might be brought down (I expect them to weasel away, though) for their hypocrisy in flouting their own rules? OK, I guess we should be grateful for that.

I can’t single out the UK for this bizarre conservative madness, given the fact that the conservative party over here sponsored an insurrection and none of the instigators are being brought to justice…and in fact, still serve in our legislative bodies. Can we organize a Christmas party for them?

Related: my university division was scheduled to have our annual Christmas party next week. We were recently informed that it has been postponed to January because “COVID cases are on the rise in the area and we want to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think it helps that we have a biologist chairing the division.

Boys will be boys…call in the exterminators

Here’s how the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was founded.

When the Chagres River was dammed in 1913, water rose to engulf 164 square miles of tropical rainforest, creating Gatun Lake and many small islands peeking above the surface. Naturalists were drawn to Barro Colorado Island, but for decades women were barred from staying overnight. David Fairchild, one of the island’s founding figures, advocated for the prohibition of women, writing in a 1924 letter that the island should remain a place “where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction.”

Right. I’ve been to places like that, where they want you to think it’s all lofty high-minded serious work, but that’s not what you get when you exclude women. You get a frat house. It’s farting, crude jokes, and lots of drinking, which is excused because everyone is “working hard” during the day…which never made sense to me, because when I’ve been working hard, I want to retire to my room, maybe read a book for a while, and get a good night’s sleep. That’s how you recover from hard work. But then, after you’ve built a culture of masculine privilege for a few decades, you might succumb to pressure to allow women to join in the research, but you’ll do it your own way. The established men get to vet all applicants and decide who they’ll let in, and hell no, they aren’t going to change the culture. Instead, these select women will be expected to join in the hard-drinking frat boy culture, and then they get to add rape and sexual harassment to the party.

I could have predicted it. That’s exactly how the STRI evolved, and wow, is it ugly.

Many researchers who set foot on the island consider the opportunity a dream. But 16 women scientists interviewed for this story described a pattern of sexual misconduct by high-ranking men at the institute, one of whom acknowledged his inappropriate behavior to BuzzFeed News. The women said that struggling to fend off the sexual demands of scientists with the power to determine a young researcher’s career trajectory left them feeling traumatized and isolated.

Seven of the scientists said they have stopped visiting the institute or collaborating with its staff on account of the unprofessional behavior they said they experienced or witnessed there, and two have left academia altogether — a #MeToo brain drain that has cost science an incalculable toll of lost research.

“I was spending more and more time figuring out how to navigate the culture there,” said Nina Wurzburger, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who worked at STRI from 2008 to 2012 but said she no longer pursues major research projects there because of the pervasive discrimination and sexual harassment.

Internal emails and complaints reviewed by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with 25 scientists, show that STRI leaders for years issued little more than verbal warnings or social restrictions to employees accused of sexual misconduct while allowing them to continue interacting with newly arrived young researchers. The institute eventually took additional disciplinary action against two of the accused scientists in 2019 and 2020. A third scientist, named in this story, continues to work at STRI.

Two scientists were disciplined out of 1200. I’m not exactly razzle-dazzled by their ‘vigorous’ response.

Here’s what needs to be done: presumably, since they’re able to say there are “leaders” at this organization, they have a chart of the hierarchy. Lop off the top of the chart. All those men get sent back to their home institutions, banned from working at STRI, or put back on the job market. They will no doubt claim to be respected, famous scientists who add prestige to the institution…but that just means they should have no trouble landing positions elsewhere. Appoint a woman to run the show. Put in place a new hiring committee that is at least half women. Rebuild the personnel from new applicants.

Yeah, it sounds draconian, but it’s what needs to be done. The worst solution (but probably the one the Smithsonian will implement) is to keep all the same people in charge, let the culture persist, and send them memos that go “tut-tut”, while continuing to bring in a few women, a handful at a time, to be sacrificial lambs to the frat house meat-grinder. This is a case where they need to burn it to the ground, metaphorically, to clear out the sex pests.

Not literally, of course. Look at the place! It’s beautiful!

Think of all the spiders living on that tropical island…

But then you read about how the assholes mismanaged it (ALL the trigger warnings on that article), and you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s not the spiders, it’s the venomous creeps who work inside it.

We can sleep when we’re dead

In a classic example of end-of-semester anxiety, I couldn’t sleep last night and got up at 2am to grade lab reports. They’re done! But now I’m either going to be a shambling, weeping mess for the rest of the day, or I’m going to get a second wind and turn manic. You never know! I do wish we had some good drugs in the house, but all I’ve got is ibuprofen and aleve.

See, students, it’s not just you suffering this time of year. Your professors are also going a bit mad.

The final hurdles are two final exams one week from today. I’ll probably make it, I think.

Entertaining misery

Well, I have no appetite now. I just read this review of Michelin-starred restaurant in Italy, and even at a distance of thousands of miles and with no prospects (or desires) to visit this pretentious little place, it quite killed my interest in food for a while. It was 27 “courses” dribbled out over four and a half hours.

This, for instance, is one full course: it’s a cast of the chef’s mouth filled with some kind of foam. There were no utensils, you were expected to lick the ‘food’ out of there.

I think, if ever I get to Italy (which I would love to do sometime), I’ll just order the pizza.

It may be cold out there, but this is fake

So stop sending it to me!

I have no idea how that could have formed naturally, but the first big clue that it’s fake is the lack of provenance. The second clue is the shape of the capture lines — this was made by someone who never really looked at an orb web. A third clue is that when you look for where it came from, you discover that it’s cropped to remove the ice sculpture of a giant spider at the bottom. Or you find that an entomologist had already debunked it.

The Christmas season is officially here

The War on Christmas is heating up, I guess.

This was an incredibly stupid act. It accomplishes nothing, advances no cause, sends no useful message. All it does is fuel the persecution complex of conservatives.

“I don’t want to hear anything about how radical some of you believe republicans to be when there are lunatics running around New York City setting Fox News Christmas tree on fire,” tweeted conservative commentator Meghan McCain, who has frequently appeared on the cable channel.

So the Republican assault on democracy, the poisoning of minds all across the country, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans by disease, the censorship of history, generations of discrimination…all that is to be swept under the rug because one guy set a fake Christmas tree on fire? A man has been charged with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and arson for it, which is entirely appropriate, and he’s going to get the book thrown at him, as you might assume. If only we could charge the entire Republican party, or at least Fox News, for the crimes against civilization they have perpetrated.

The one person dumber than the idiot who lit a tree on fire might just be Meghan McCain.

Minor Christian nightmare

I had to do some quick shopping to pick up a few winter essentials, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll give the local version of a big box store, one run by our terrible fundagelical brethren, another try. They can’t be that bad, can they?

Then I saw this wall of goods, and decided there was nothing I needed from them that badly.

Yeah, no, nope nope nopitty nope-nope.