How a spider eats

This video has been online for 9 years, and only has 358 views. That’s sad. Maybe it has something to do with the subject?

If you’ve wondered how spiders eat, they have a pair of chelicerae in front of their face that are used for injecting venom/chopping up prey, but they’re not for ingestion at all. They have mouthparts behind the chelicerae, which they then use for sucking up fluids and spitting up more saliva. The video is a closeup of a prey animal with a rather translucent exoskeleton, so you can actually see the juices sloshing around inside and being sucked out. This is cool; fruit flies don’t show much, there is only a small amount of bug goo inside, but I have seen mealworms get their guts literally drained out of the exoskeleton, leaving nothing but a hollow shell when the spider is done.

I can guess why this is an unpopular video, so I’ll hide it below the fold.

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I voted for Hillary Clinton, once

I’m sorry.

My only excuse is that her opponent was even more awful, but she should never have gotten to that level in the first place, except that she does appeal to conservative Democrats. I also liked the idea of a woman for president (still do), so I was willing to accept a compromise in what I valued.

Somewhere, I wish I could remember where, I read that the Clintons managed to replace the Democratic party with Republican Lite, and that one of the consequences of that is that real Republicans were free to run far, far off into crazy town. That rings true to me.

What finally convinced me that the Clintons were a huge mistake was a recent chatty (so much pointless detail about what she had for lunch!) in the Financial Times. The whole thing made me feel ill.

My espresso has arrived. Clinton asks for more iced tea. I cannot allow the lunch to end without questioning the direction of her party. I say that Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict JK Rowling as a fascist? To my surprise, Clinton shares the premise of my question.

“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” she says. “Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”

Whatever helps you win. That’s a phrase that belongs on the Clinton coat of arms. No principles, no goals, just whatever gets you power, that’s all that matters. Just once, I’d like to see a Democrat stand up and forthrightly say what they value, so I’d know if I agreed with them, and they’d get my vote.

Oh, hey, there is one: John Fetterman is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania. This is what I want to see from everyone who thinks they belong in the Democratic party.

Don’t hide from it. Don’t tell me you’ll tolerate transphobia in the name of winning.

I’ll never vote for a Clinton again. To put it in terms she might understand, she’s a loser. Isn’t that all that counts?

Pity Elon

This is just the worst. In time for Father’s Day, Elon Musk’s daughter filed a petition to change her name and gender.

I am definitely not a Musk fan, but I don’t wish this kind of pain on anyone. Her explanation for why she’s doing this is a knife right to the heart.

He’s the richest man in the world, and that is a statement that demonstrates he’s a total failure in the game of life — he can’t even win the respect of the child he presumably raised from infancy. I’m just saying that if one of my kids said something like that to me I would be shattered and would seriously be questioning my whole life. Maybe Musk is so unconscionable and so disinterested in his children that he is unperturbed by such a statement, but I can’t imagine myself feeling that way, so maybe I’m reading my own values into him, but man, I couldn’t help but feel some deep pain on reading that.

Now I’ve gone and made myself vulnerable to my kids, handed them a knife and told them exactly where to stick it, but I’m fairly confident that they wouldn’t do me that kind of harm.

Distantly related, but weird: I did not know that Musk’s former partner, Grimes, had a Minnesota connection.

Back in 2009, when Grimes was just a 21-year-old college student eager to go on an adventure, she paired up with 23-year-old William Gratz, who she met at school in Montreal, according to a 2009 Star Tribune report. The couple packed chickens, a sewing machine, and 20 pounds of potatoes into a houseboat that they built from scratch. They named the boat Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and called themselves Veruschka and Zelda Xox, seemingly with the goal of taking off on a journey worthy of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a book they packed for the ride but had not read.

They had spent more than a month constructing the 20-foot boat on a friend’s property in Bemidji, Minnesota, from where they hauled it to Minneapolis. They installed “accordion folding doors, glass windows, pink shutters and painted murals in black, white and red paint of fantastical creatures on the sides. Strangers gave them bikes, a mattress and the sewing machine (powered by on-board batteries).”

According to the Star Tribune report, they intended to sail from Minneapolis to New Orleans, but their journey ended up being only a few miles downstream after boat engine troubles and run-ins with law enforcement…

Okaaay. They hadn’t read the book, and their trip only lasted a few days. What a strange story…

The schadenfreude continues

I don’t follow crypto religiously — there’s no way I’d ever invest in such an obvious grift, just like I avoid MLMs and Ponzi schemes — but I do have to occasionally chortle when the fraud becomes obvious. Apparently, this past week, Bitcoin dropped below a significant threshold.

Bitcoin had bobbled along all this week just above $20,000. Ether similarly bobbled along just above $1,000.

This was not a psychological level. There were large DeFi loans that would liquidate if the price number went down. Liquidations like this were what had just destroyed the crypto investment funds.

You could watch the charts as borrowers frantically poured millions of actual dollars into the markets, desperate to prop up the price. Often, a seller would dump straight into the pump, a minute later. Thanks for the exit liquidity!

This, too, worked until it didn’t.

This morning, Bitcoin broke below $20,000 at 06:51 UTC on Saturday 18 June 2022. It plummeted from $20,300 to $19,100 in just a few minutes:

Ether finally went as well, at 07:18 UTC. Someone on /r/buttcoin got live video of the $1,000 buy wall on Coinbase ETH-USD being destroyed. Beauty, grace and style, 10/10 from all judges.

They’re doomed. Really, the only reason I pay attention at all is for David Gerard’s entertaining descriptions of the circus.

It’s a huge Rube Goldberg machine slapstick custard pie clown car, where each custard pie triggers three more custard pies. A clown’s tie pops up, causing three other clowns’ ties to pop up. Several tons of organic cow manure fall from above. The clowns stick their heads up out of the poop, proclaiming how clean they are and what a mess everyone else is.

As long as you haven’t invested in crypto yourself, the show is totally free!

Capitalism wins!

It’s impressive that Lyft can profit off women getting raped in their cars. Lyft just paid out $25 million in a lawsuit that accused them of failing to protect passengers from predatory drivers. You might assume that money went to the victims, but no.

According to Alison Turkos, one of the survivor-plaintiffs suing Lyft, neither she nor any of the other survivors harmed by Lyft are receiving a dime. She told Jezebel in a phone interview that she fears people who see Thursday’s news will read “$25 million” and “settlement” and conclude that Lyft is paying survivors.

It’s not.

In 2017, Turkos was held at gun-point and kidnapped by a Lyft driver, taken to an abandoned park and gang-raped by him and several men. Now, Lyft is paying its ultra-rich shareholders $25 million. They say they were the ones who were harmed—because Lyft cost them money by mishandling sexual assault allegations. Lyft did not immediately respond to Jezebel’s request for comment for this piece.

Holding shares in Lyft is an investment in profiting off rape.

I hope you all had a pleasant Juneteenth

Except for these guys.

I hope they were miserable and frustrated and seething with racist anger all day long.

Franklin Police said one of the groups consisted of people carrying signs that read “White Lives Matter” and “Stop White Replacement.” They added that another group, who said they were a buffer between festival-goers and the other group, included people who were armed and wearing ballistic vests.

Members of each group were also reportedly handling out pamphlets saying they are protesting because “the anti-white system is committed to our physical genocide” to festival attendees before police arrived.

Juneteenth is supposed to be a community celebration; you get together and have picnics and talk with each other. Why would you need AR-15s or bullet proof vests for that? The signs also help explain their intent — these were simply dumbass racists.

Also, I’m curious. These were probably the same people who were outraged at mask mandates, yet here they are, willingly wearing masks. Do you think they’ve had a change of heart, seen the rising infection numbers, and decided to protect themselves from COVID?

The Texas GOP party platform — the madness continues

How deep into madness is the conservative agenda?

The new platform would call for:

  • Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
  • Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
  • Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
  • Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
  • Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
  • Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
  • Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours.
  • Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Don’t forget this!

My idiosyncratic criterion for how bad is getting that years ago, I was focused on the creationist perspective they were always pushing. They still are! The traditional (for creationists) “strengths and weaknesses” language is still being promoted in the official Texas GOP platform.

Scientific Theories: We support objective teaching of scientific theories, such as life origins and climate change. These shall be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students shall discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly, without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.

The thing is, now they’ve got so much more and so much worse evil advocacy in their platform that no one is bothering to mention the old stupidities. I’m actually kind of impressed at their restraint. They’re happy to come right out and say homosexuality is bad and they want to end gay marriage, the income tax, and that they oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use, but they can’t quite summon the courage to openly push for a seven day, young earth creation…even though that’s what they want.

How to spot a bad journal

I get solicitations to publish papers all the time, and I just roundfile ’em. There are journals that are desperate for suckers to pay them to publish their work, and they’ll accept anything. We call them predatory journals, but I have a reservation about that: the whole establishment scientific publishing system is predatory, taking the federally funded output of scientists and billing them so that they can publish. But some are more lacking in discrimination and prestige than others, and have lower standards to the point of absurdity.

Dan Phelps got invited to publish in the International Journal of Paleobiology & Paleontology, which sure sounds like Serious Science, but he took one look at their table of contents and could tell this was a garbage dump. Do you notice anything funny about it?

When accused of being a predatory journal, they have a curious response.

Thank you for your reply, We would like to inform you that ours is not a predatory journal. We have received the ISSN which is provided in our previous email. For your convenience, we are providing the link of our journal where you can find complete information of our journal and Editorial Board members. Link: https://medwinpublishers.com/IJPBP/index.php Kindly revert back if you have any queries. Look forward hear from you soon. Kind Regards, Jackie Crystal Assistant Managing Editor

They can’t be a predatory journal, they have an ISSN! The International Standard Serial Number just means they registered with an organization that issues unique ID numbers to periodicals, magazines, newspapers, even blogs (kinda expensive with no big advantages, so we don’t have one here), and the organization itself says, “it does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents”.

Some of those titles are dead giveaways, though, and I felt like digging into them a bit. Here’s a fun one, Proving that Dinosaurs are Distant Ancestors of Humans – The East Asian Locus of Evolution that disproves definitively the “Out of Africa” Theory. The title alone tells you that this is nonsense, and that there was no peer review, and that the journal will publish anything.

It was written by Florent Pirot, who is an independent researcher — that means he isn’t a professional employed by any relevant institution. That’s fine, amateur scientists are welcome, but all you have to do is read the abstract to see there’s no substance here.

The study of evolution is clad with vivid debates and each new fossil brought back from ground studies can start a debate, with the ever-existing risk of creative artists looking for celebrity and building dangerously resembling creatures out of thin air. There nevertheless is a very significant, and simple, way, to demonstrate that the parentry of humans is not to be found in the mice of the Jurassic that are presented to be the founding mammals in the mainstream theory but that big dinosaurs that escaped the -65 MY disasters slowly evolved into standing mammals and that our genes are more related to these mammals. Existing literature from PNAS and Science is brought together with the analysis of the author to prove the point.

That doesn’t say anything. He is saying in clumsy English that humans descended from dinosaurs that escaped the KT extinction, but he doesn’t say what he’s going to do in this paper. It’s just as well; this is going to be an exercise in pareidolia and random leaps of logic. For instance:

In Central Asia and Mongolia, the findings of the Nemegtosaurus in the Nemegt Basin show parentry with aurochs, based on the skull, and suggest a farther relation with oreodonts. The skull’s eyes (in the model presented in the Polish Academy of Sciences Evolution Museum) are below two circular areas that obviously were fitted with horns that were perhaps renewed each year, as in deers today. The prominence of the jaws suggests a link with Theropithecus gelada.

Here’s Nemegtosaurus:

Here’s an aurochs:

Anyone care to tell me where they show “parentry”? Because Mr Pirot doesn’t.

This, by the way, is Theropithecus gelada, the gelada baboon. I don’t see anything about the jaws of baboon, aurochs, and dinosaur that suggest a link, other than the general one, that they all have jaws.

Then he gets to his “data”. This, for instance, is a Parasaurolophus beak remain incrusted in the crystallized magmatic rock. Picture taken in Valbonne, from local supply of rocks.

No it’s not.

Another “fossil,” Theropitecus Gelada skull also molded in magma, from the same rock supply as above, estimated to be 10 to 12 MY old:

No, that’s not a baboon skull.

Read further and you find that Florent Pirot is a silly man who putters about in his yard in Valbonne, France looking at random rocks and imagining similarities with various species that he has read about, linking them in imaginary patterns of descent that he can’t justify.

He’s a French Ed Conrad or Roger Spurr! He’s one up on them because he managed to publish a couple of papers on his bizarre ideas in a garbage journal.

Yes, more than one. Here’s another you’ll find entertaining: The Saint Loup of the Col Du Fam, A Smilodon Caught in a Lava Bubble. He’s got lots of pictures of rocks that he fancies to be dramatic fossils, like this one of a teeth.

Ha ha, you may laugh, but keep in mind that this is delusional kook who is being preyed upon by a journal that charges substantial page fees (I don’t know what this one charges, but typically it’s on the order of hundreds of dollars) to put his mad ideas in print. If you can be outraged that televangelists bilk donations out of the poor to build their media empires, you should recognize that this is exactly the same thing, simply substituting Science for Jesus.

The other thing that should annoy you is some creationist wanker like Matt Powell will seize on this and wander about telling people that those stupid evilutionists believe dinosaurs evolved into a baboon evolved into humans when no, we don’t. Some bête imbécile in the South of France thinks that, and a criminally fraudulent journal is parasitizing him.