Am I supposed to care?

The FBI raided Trump’s house in Florida.

Former president Donald Trump said Monday that the FBI had raided his Mar-a-Lago Club and searched his safe — activity related to an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified documents, according to two people familiar with the probe.

This trivial act seems to have thrown the MAGAts into hysterical fits.

I’m sorry, but if you weren’t outraged at the killing of Breonna Taylor, you should sit this one out. This “raid” was practically deferential — they got a formal warrant, guys in suits walked in and searched for some papers, and they walked out. That’s what the justice system ought to do, getting a warrant to respect privacy concerns, and using it to undramatically gather information. Do the right-wingers think Trump had something to hide?

Of course, the media is also in a tizzy.

Searching a former president’s property to look for possible evidence of a crime is highly unusual and would require approval at the top levels of the Justice Department. It represents a historic moment in Trump’s tortured relationship with the Justice Department, both in and out of the White House.

Why is it unusual? Why does it require unusually high levels of approval? The guy is a private citizen. The process should require no greater care than searching my home or your home or anyone’s home. An ex-president should have no greater rights than anyone else. I thought this country was supposed to be founded on a principle that there is no aristocracy? (As with most myths about the founding, that one’s a lie.)

Meanwhile, you know that Trump was sloppy and heedless of confidentiality issues. His entire gang is. Would you believe that part of the fallout from Alex Jones phone data is that he had a naked photo of his wife that he sent to Roger Stone? I’m more dismayed by that than that the FBI served a lawful warrant and gathered documents that might (emphasis on “might”, they might exonerate him. Ha.) be embarrassing to a shameless ex-president.

Undergraduates: xkcd is not a good source for career advising

I must object to the methodology and the conclusions of this comic.

The choice of prefixes to sample is arbitrary and shows a bias towards common physics terms. Why not use “evolutionary” or “genome” or “analytic” or “necro-” or “chrono-“, to name just a few more. The sample space has hardly been touched.

The idea that low Google scholar counts is an opportunity is ludicrous and confuses cause and effect. “Clown” is a prefix that doesn’t show up for either physics or biology or engineering (curiously, there are 3 entries for “clown chemistry”, 5 for “clown psychology”, 1 for “clown dentistry”, and 13 for “clown theology”). I don’t think this implies there is a hot market for clown physicists.

Although, I do think that high-energy clown physics might be a fun field.

Another week, another data point

I’m still regularly collecting data on growth rates in Steatoda triangulosa. Here’s what it looks like on day 39 (dark red line is the mean, I’ve included data for individual spiders in a lighter color to illustrate the variation):

They’re now at about, or over, half the adult body size, and are looking fairly mature. The palps haven’t fully matured, so I can’t sex them very well, but the ones I suspect are male — they just have a bit of a bulge — are on the smaller size. The couple that have really taken off look very female to me so far.

I’m discovering all kinds of complications, though. In particular, size is definitely a function of feeding. I gave them all a mealworm earlier this week, and some of them look hugely rotund right now. Fruit flies are definitely not adequate for the full nutrition of a growing spider, so it looks like I’m going to need to spruce up the mealworm colony soon. I’ve got another S. triangulosa egg sac that has reached the stage of seething darkness, which means I’ll have more babies this week.

Also the pigmentation is distinct and strong, and now it’s obvious that these spiders have white triangles on a dark background, rather than dark stripes on a pale background. This next batch of babies are going to require daily mapping of pigment patterns so I can see exactly what’s going on. I’m about to post a few photos on the Patreon page, if you want to see.

It takes courage to visit CPAC

Wanna see a toothy asshole being obnoxious? No? Too bad, here it is.

The obnoxious one actually posted this clip to his website as if he was proud of his behavior, or thought he was funny or clever. He was neither.

On top of his smug harassment, though, what I found most telling is that his complaints were all false. She’s the only one wearing a mask — but she was in the right, and all the smirking jerks in the crowd were wrong. He pesters about her vaccination status, and she rightly tells him it’s none of his business, but he goes on to babble about how she’s “viral shedding”. No, she’s not. That’s a right wing fiction.

So that’s what right-wing criticism is like.

I hope the Vice reporter got hazard pay.

It doesn’t work on spiders

Mary told me I should mention this app, Merlin Bird ID, in case you don’t already have it. You fire it up, click on a button, and it just listens and tells you what birds it hears. I got it a while back because the crazy early morning bird cacophony was bugging me — at least I ought to know who’s shrieking at me early in the morning. I can sit in my office and have it inform me what all the noise is about. This morning it was black-capped chickadees chattering away, blue jays and redwinged blackbirds making a ruckus, and an American robin fussing about. It’s not as bad as it was earlier this summer, because we also have a Cooper’s hawk hanging about in the neighborhood. When it squeaks, it gets quiet, briefly.

Hey, I’ve noticed fewer squirrels making pests of themselves lately. I wonder if I should play recordings of a Cooper’s hawk when they start climbing the bird feeder and scrabbling at my window. (Before you say squirrels are pretty clever and will just learn to ignore the noise, that’s part of the plan: they’ll become more vulnerable to hawks then.)

If you’re more of a visual person, I’ll also recommend Seek from iNaturalist. Put that on your phone, aim it at any organism, and it’ll use the iNaturalist database to let you know the scientific name of what you’re seeing. It’s very handy. It even works on spiders, unlike the Bird ID program.

I guess I need to say it again: squid didn’t come from space

Fuck panspermists, and fuck creationists. They are pretty much indistinguishable. It’s their fault I had to listen to Ann Gauger of the Discovery Institute misrepresent wackaloons like Chandra Wickramasinghe as representative of good evolutionary thinking, in a podcast titled Octopuses from the Sky: Scientists Propose “Aliens Seeded Life on Earth”. You can see why that caught my eye.

On this ID the Future from the vault, biologist Ann Gauger discuss panspermia, the topic of a peer-reviewed paper published recently by several very serious scientists. Panspermia tries to sidestep problems in origins biology by suggesting that, to quote the title of an old science fiction movie, “it came from outer space.” And yes, according to this explanation, maybe aliens even sent it our way. Maybe (honest — this is a real theory) the first octopuses came here special delivery, as encapsulated embryos falling from the sky. Anything but intelligent design, for these very serious scientists. Tune in to learn from Dr. Gauger what precisely drove these scientists to such an explanation.

They are also indistinguishable from Kent Hovind and Matt Powell, who have also promoted this idea that serious scientists seriously propose that squid seriously fell from comets to land on Earth. Gauger even claims that “some scientists say” bats came from outer space (I’ve never seen such a claim), because the fossil record of bats is very poor, so they couldn’t possibly have evolved.

That gives the game away. Bad scientists, panspermists and creationists, see any absence of evidence is evidence for their cockamamie ideas, and ignore all the evidence against them. Bats are poorly preserved as fossils, but we’ve got unambiguous molecular and genetic evidence that bats are mammals, not aliens, just as we have unambiguous evidence that octopuses are molluscs. There’s no reason to think that any complex organism fell from a comet. Anyone who argues otherwise is an ignorant loon. No, no one with any credibility in science thinks panspermia is a scientific idea; a few people have suggested it as a possibility — a remote possibility that complex molecules falling from space might have contributed to the evolution of protocells — but they all have to agree that no, there is no scientific evidence of such a thing, and further, most would agree that a more productive hypothesis, one with real evidence, is that life arose here on Earth from prebiotic chemistry.

To argue that scientists really believe that crap is deceitful scumbaggery that aligns Intelligent Design creationism with literalist Biblical creationism. They both lie.

Honest campaign strategy: Republicans want to kill you

Hey, you all remember that spectacularly effective bit of political theater coined by Sarah Palin that updating our health care system slightly would lead to death panels, where lawyers would sit in judgment over you to decide whether you were worthy of receiving health care? It was total lie, but it fired up the right-wing media and was a potent meme on the right. There was a good reason for that: American citizens are terrified by medical concerns, because we can’t afford any kind of health crisis and know that we’re one little disease away from losing our savings, our home, any kind of financial security. Republicans knew that, and saw it as a way to frighten voters into voting for them.

If only we could have known…

There’s your death panel. Republican lawyers enforcing Republican laws to make women suffer and die. The primary criterion these lawyers and politicians of death are using to determine whether you are worthy of living seems to be your sex. And they aren’t done! They’ve announced their intent to kill gay marriage, ban contraceptives, and of course, they hate trans folk to death.

Already they’re taking steps to expand their oppression. Indiana has enacted a total ban on abortion.

The Indiana ban, which goes into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. Indiana joins nine other states that have abortion bans starting at conception.

There is no shortage of Republicans who resent those exemptions.

This destructive hatefulness ought to be the focus of the Democratic party. They need to recognize Sarah Palin’s one good idea, dishonest as it was, and point out honestly that Republicans want to replace doctors with lawyers and pharmaceutical salespeople. It isn’t just women who should fear their policies: we’re on a long slow path to doom. This is what American exceptionalism looks like.

Great. I might have to retire to Italy or South Korea to get away from Republican parasites. The food would be better, too.

There’s more horror on the way! I wouldn’t want to be trans in this country if the Republicans get their way.

So get out there and vote! That’s the first step to save your life. Then once you get Democrats in office, don’t stop — they’re taking money from lawyers, health care companies, and insurance companies too, and we need to clean up that dirty money as well.

Conservative philosophy is both stupid and pretentious

In case you didn’t know, John Rawls’ concept of the “veil of ignorance” is the idea that society should be structured by people who have no idea of what role they will occupy in it — that a truly just society has to be defined by principles that are equitable and unbiased. So, for example, when Thomas Jefferson was working on the Declaration of Independence, he should be ignorant of where he’d end up in this new nation — there’s a chance he could end up as a wealthy landowner, and also a chance he could end up a black woman, slave to a wealthy landowner. We’d have a very different country if that had been the case for those founding fathers, who ended up creating a nation designed for their advantage, and black slaves…well, sucks to be you.

You’ve probably exercised something similar to this in the standard cake-cutting problem. If two people are splitting a cake, one person cuts, but the other person gets to choose which half they get — basically, the cutter is behind a veil of ignorance about which piece they get, so they’ll strive to divide the cake fairly.

Straightforward, right? Really hard to implement on a large scale, but I like the idea. Unfortunately, it can also be abused. Carl Bergstrom tweeted this example out.

Aaargh. I sympathize with Bergstrom preferring to go birding. It breaks my brain to try and see her warped point of view, and unfortunately, I felt compelled to try.

I just can’t get past “would you rather be conceived…”. Prior to my conception, I did not exist. I would not have even basic preferences, like whether “I” would like to live or die, until “I” had undergone significant biological development. Eggs and sperm do not have preferences. Neither do embryos. Fetuses probably (but not certainly) lack a conscious sense of self, which I suspect is going to emerge in the infant (you need awareness of others to do that). I don’t see how this is even a decent thought experiment.

This is a bit like imagining asking sperm to vote on state laws, or dipping into the gene pool to get their opinion on the equitable distribution of opportunity. Those aren’t conscious agents who can even conceive of a philosophy of personhood, and almost all of them are going to disappear, oblivious of everything, before the next generation which can think & reason & feel & make choices arises.

It’s a really weird premise, too. “You” are a being independent of your physical, biological self, and you’re floating around in the ether making decisions about where you will manifest? It’s like imagining that you had a prior existence wondering whether you’d poof into existence as either a person with a lawn mower or a blade of grass, and invoking Rawls to rationalize how individual blades of grass deserve full social and civic rights. It’s nonsense. It’s totally McArdled.

Screw it, Bergstrom is right. I’m going to go spidering.

Minnesotans! Vote!

Maybe later we can vote on changing that hideous seal?

I only realized this weekend that we have an election this Tuesday. I’m so used to thinking of elections happening in November that I almost overlooked it.

At least deciding who to vote for is easy: if they are a Republican, there’s no way any sane individual could support them. Democrats, as usual, are an undisciplined mess, and somehow, multiple candidates are running as Democrats. Who to vote for? I propose a simple rule: vote for the incumbent Democrats. Normally, that would be a way to perpetuate lackluster leadership, but right now, with Evil in the opposing slot, we need as simple and clear a rubric as possible. So, yeah, I’m going to vote for boring, uninspiring Walz for governor.

Other obvious answers you already know for winnowing down the field: don’t vote for amusing weirdos, so no, we don’t want Captain Jack Sparrow for lieutenant governor. Don’t be seduced by tangential issues: I’m entirely in favor of legalizing marijuana, but do we really need two new parties, the Legalize Marijuana Now party and the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party, to advocate for a single issue? No, we do not, they’re just splitting the liberal vote.

This year, we should be all about holding the line presenting a solid front, and less about revolutionary actions. We can get radical when fewer people’s lives are on the line, and believe me, when Republicans get elected, people will die.

Spider Studio Mk. I

I’ve been struggling to document pigmentation changes in my developing Steatoda triangulosa because they’re annoyingly alive. They’ve got preferences — they like to hang upside down, they will occasionally move, they are not being obliging as far as photography goes. They’re as lovely as a supermodel, but they’re also somewhat diva-ish and uncooperative. When I tell them to pose, or spread those legs, or look at the camera, they just ignore me. It also doesn’t help that I’ve got them living in these rigid containers, and if I shoo them out into a more photogenic location they get agitated and skitter about.

So I thought of a better way to manipulate them. Behold, Spider Studio Mk. I!

As usual, simple is better. All this is is a strip of paper curled into a cylinder, held together with two pieces of tape, sandwiched between the top and bottom of a petri dish. It’s ridiculously simple. The first test was to put a spider in there and see what they thought of it. They liked it! They built a cobweb in there and were hanging there, as always, when I came in this morning. Big bonus: they seem to prefer attaching silk to the paper walls than to the plastic dishes. I simply took away the petri dishes, leaving me with a nice calm undisturbed spider hanging in a paper hoop. I could orient the ring any way I wanted without stressing the spider at all!

I took a few pictures of my test subjects (I’ll put them on my Patreon for anyone who really wants to see them). It was great. I could take a picture of the dorsal side, and then flip the ring and take an equivalent picture of the ventral side.

I still have to make a few refinements. The paper ring is a bit thicker than necessary, and it still gets in the way when oriented to certain angles, so I’ll make thinner ones. I’m also going to stick some paper handles to the outside so I can use these soldering helping hands I’ve got to hold them in place.

There’s nothing I can do to cope with these being living animals. They still like to shuffle around on their web, but minimizing manipulation reduces that.

More progress!