We’re raising Steatoda borealis in the house, and one couple has produced two egg sacs recently. The male and female coexist just fine, and here you can see the male has the job of guarding his progeny.
This is part of Mary’s collection of spider friends, and she was a little worried about what to do when these hatch out. No problem — I’ll take over then.
I don’t celebrate New Year’s Eve. I won’t be staying up until midnight, I won’t be drinking champagne with my sweetie, there will be no party. I will acknowledge a few common New Year’s Eve practices, though.
Predictions! It’s traditional on New Year’s Eve to look forward and predict what the coming year will bring. Here’s my prediction:
Everything will get much, much worse. Chaos will reign. Everything will fall apart. Expect the Republic to fall, genocide will rage all around the world, crops will fail, plague will sweep across the planet.
Prove me wrong.
Resolutions! Nothing really matters, but I will be making one change. I’ve refrained from going full arachnophile on this blog, and that means I’ve neglected the founding ethos of Pharyngula: I write for me, not you. So no more restraint, I’ll post spiders when I want to.
Some of you may argue that my resolution is contributing to my prediction, but hey, when the world burns, snuggle up to a spider.
I’m suddenly reading a viral anecdote all over the place — the claim that a “body butter” (whatever that is) called “Delícia Drench” and marketed by the cosmetics company, Sephora, attracts wolf spiders.
SCENT ATTRACTS WOLF SPIDERS
If you’re scared of wolf spiders- watch out for these lotions lol. I wanted to love them sooo bad, but one of the ingredients is like kryptonite to wolf spiders! When I put it on instantly one will come out. Normally I’ll see one every like 3 years, used this and it was every day. I stopped using it and haven’t seen one since…. oh and one time, the spider wanted to eat whatever ingredient it is so bad that it chased me. I swear on everything. I’d run left, it ran left, I ran right, it ran right. Like it was legit following the scent. And no, the scent isn’t that good, nothing a $5 vanilla cream can’t match. So yeah, do be careful if you’re frightened of spiders, especially the big wolf ones. Also, plz don’t hurt them if you do wear this & they appear. Use a cup and put them outside. Sorry for a disappointing review.
There are a few red flags here. It’s a negative review written by someone who apparently wants to discourage purchase of the product. It’s an account that says little more than that the writer noticed lots of spiders. I hate to tell you this, but I don’t use “body butter” and I can see swarms of wolf spiders in season — they’re ubiquitous and common. Wolf spiders scamper all over the place, they’re very active animals, so telling me that one seemed to be chasing you is unimpressive.
And that’s it. One anecdote. Why would anyone think it’s particularly interesting?
OK, then someone came up with a reasonable explanation for a particularly unsupported and unrepeated observation.
Hello. I just did a little dive into chemicals that attract spiders because I really don’t like bugs. Ao according to studies? There is a two component female produced pheromone of spider. It basically signals for sexual communication. The chemical analysis reveals that “farnesyl acetate, diisobutyl phthalate and hexadecyl acetate of the spider webs exhibited higher relative abundance in sexually receptive females” also, “Two choice behavioral essays verified that the blend of farnesyl acetate and hexadecyl acetate attracted males”.
Farnesyl acetate is primarily used in skincare for fragrance and same for Hexadecyl Acetate (cetyl acetate) for fruity smell and waxy appearance. Cetyle acetate is commonly used as a thickening agent for body cream and lotion.
Marchingkoala
Vaguely interesting. Spiders do a lot of chemical signaling, so finding that two common chemical signals are also present in the ingredient list of a beauty product does add the faintest patina of plausibility to the anecdote, which, I must add, has not been validated at all. I’m also dubious that a spider would find the the exact combination of these two chemicals on a surface at all appealing, and also not be thoroughly put off by all the other goop found in a product called “Delicia Drench.” It’s like suggesting that a dab of androstadienone, a putative human hormone, would make a compost heap irresistible to passing women.
I would need to see some actual empirical testing before I’d believe any of this. It’s possible but unlikely, and there’s no verified phenomenon that needs explanation. If I had some Delicia Drench in the house, I might test it in the spring — it would be easy, put a drop of the stuff in a cup at the bottom of a pit trap, and measure the frequency of wolf spiders caught relative to traps without the stuff. I’m just not interested enough to buy some Sephora gunk to see if it does anything.
Also, there’s no point: Sephora has rushed to claim that they have removed farnesyl acetate and hexadecyl acetate from their products!
I do not know if wolf spiders are actually sensitive to Delicia Drench, but I can at least say that capitalist corporations are extremely sensitive to rumors that might compromise profitability.
Please, everyone, learn to question tenuous claims that lack any empirical support!
See the nice couple? They have a busy career making videos and writing books. They seem to be enjoying their life.
Geri and Jay Hart are the pen names of a married woman and man who serve in executive positions at two well-known organizations in the U.S. They frequently participate in civic and charitable events and appear in their local media. Although their careers keep Geri and Jay well occupied individually, their top priority is being together. During shared times they enjoy exercising, traveling, eating healthy food, and—of course—exploring and savoring their sexuality. See select videos and follow them on OnlyFans, X (formerly Twitter), and PornHub @SexyHappyCouple.
“Geri and Jay Hart” are pseudonyms — they do a lot of sex stuff, and want their privacy. Somebody leaked their actual names, and…uh-oh, Jay Hart’s real name is Joe Gow, and he was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. You can imagine how that went down.
Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow said Thursday that the school’s governing board fired him because members were uncomfortable with him and his wife producing and appearing in pornographic videos.
The Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents, which oversees UW-Madison, UW-La Crosse and 11 other regional campuses, voted unanimously during a hastily convened closed meeting Wednesday evening to fire Gow.
After the vote, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and regents President Karen Walsh issued statements saying the regents had learned of specific conduct by Gow that subjected the university to “significant reputational harm.” Rothman called Gow’s actions “abhorrent” and Walsh said she was “disgusted.” But neither of them offered any details of the allegations.
No details. I glanced through their stuff (blushing all the way), and it’s all very explicit, but the focus is on consent and mutual pleasure. I didn’t see anything abhorrent or disgusting…well, maybe a tightly-puckered sphincter of a prude would dislike them. They fired him because he had a happy, cheerful sex life, something none of the regents would ever have.
They’re also planning to have his tenure revoked.
Unless there is evidence of non-consensual behavior, none of this should happen. Unless we’re going to fire everyone for the ‘crime’ of being sexual, there are no grounds for dismissal here.
There’s an interesting counterpoint in the case of Bridget Ziegler, the far-right co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who was discovered to have an interesting sex life — she was involved in a three-way sexual relationship. Again, as long as it’s consensual, no big deal; her husband, on the other hand, was accused of raping their partner, which is a big deal. Ziegler was not fired for her sexual activities, and I have no problem with that, although she should have been fired for extraordinary hypocrisy, since she rode into her position by condemning others for their sex acts. At least some people realize that. This student zeroed in on the real problem.
Calls for Ziegler to resign her position on the Sarasota School Board continue to this day, and a public hearing was recently held, with parents and students demanding she step down. One Sarasota parent, Sally Sells, explained the issue wasn’t what the Zieglers do in the bedroom. “Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” Sells said. Former Sarasota student Zander Moricz drove home that point. “Bridget, you deserve to be fired from your job because you are terrible at your job, not because you had sex with a woman,” Moricz said.
The kids are all right.
I have a concern that there are way too many people out there who will read this and agree with the smug guy with the goatee.
I wish he was saying goodbye.
I know that Sam Altman is rich, is controversial, is in charge of OpenAI, yadda yadda yadda, but I was wondering what his expertise was, what he actually does to earn attention, because it’s not as if there’s anything I can point to and say, “Sam Altman was responsible for that.” He just seems to have a lot of money that he spends on other people who do a lot of different things. The Washington Post ran a long and laudatory article that I read to find the answer.
Here’s the shortest summary I could find.
In a Silicon Valley milieu in which shooting star companies often give birth to cults of personality around firms’ founders, Altman has stood out. An investor with a dizzying array of interests, Altman might lack the singular focus of a Steve Jobs — or the sophisticated technical skills to create the products he sells — but according to fans and rivals, he has had since an early age an uncanny entrepreneurial energy and a force of will that inspires others to do their creative best.
Jesus. That’s a particularly vacuous bit of empty PR, isn’t it? So he has an “uncanny entrepreneurial energy” and “force of will,” and what he does with that is inspire other people to do the work he can’t.
Reading between the lines in the rest of the article, it becomes clear that what he has is lots of money, which he acquired by becoming best buddies with people like Peter Thiel, and that lots of people want to say nice things about him in hopes that he’ll give them some of his money. He’s a college dropout with no particular skills, other than money.
The article ends with this bullshit.
“He’s the kind of founder that can bend reality,” said Hemant Taneja, a friend of Altman’s and managing director of the venture capital firm General Catalyst, adding that Altman had invited him to invest in OpenAI but that he declined because he couldn’t understand the company’s complex structure. “By creating the fastest and most popular consumer application of generative AI, he showed us the art of the possible. … This is the first technology where every CEO of every company in every industry is now thinking about how to do AI in their business. He made that happen.”
So he’s a hype machine, aided by highly placed friends, who promotes the AI buzzword which people are already beginning to back away from. OK, got it.
One of our modern problems is that the structure of our society incessantly pushes money-shuffling assholes to the top of everything, rather than competent people with actual constructive skills. I’m not impressed by Altman or others of his ilk…which is, unfortunately, why I’ll die poor someday.
Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.
She just couldn’t spit up a statement about how slaves were denied those freedoms, and instead tried to turn it into some variation of a state’s right excuse.
The questioner was inaudible, but said something about slavery. Haley says What do you want me to say about slavery?
and then fails to say anything…Next question.
It’s a perfect example of why the Civil War isn’t over yet, and how the Republican party has inherited the mantle of the Confederacy.
Oh, good. Someone transcribed the whole exchange, including the inaudible bits I couldn’t make out.
“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.'” That about sums it up.
I should warn you, I’m not in a good mood. The Xmas season does that to me, I’m soured on the ugly combination of raging religiosity and constant consumerism, and then the elevated expectations that the holiday never meets, and the fact that it’s just a brief break between labors that I have to spend getting prepared for the next semester. Just call me Scrooge, and I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t expect redemption.
Another thing that doesn’t help is other humans. See that grinning fellow on the right? That’s Richard Eggleston, retired ophthalmologist, and shallow Christian. Also a colossal motherfucking dumbass idiot who used his holiday to write a long cliched letter to his local newspaper in which he declared “We are seeing the last few gasps of macroevolution” and parrots the dumbest, most thoroughly refuted canards of the last 60+ years of creationism, failing to acknowledge even the slightest doubt his dogma.
Before I vomit all over it, let me say that I don’t think most Christians share his views. Most citizens of this country broadly accept the general idea that the Earth is very old and that life has changed over that long history, although many will try to vaguely credit some kind of god as having a poorly-defined role in somehow guiding it, and they may also have a reluctance to say humans are directly a product of that process. We’re special, you know. There is, however, a cult-like subset that actively and stupidly denies pretty much all of science in order to prop up their benighted beliefs about Jesus. Richard Eggleston represents these cancerous polyps growing in the feculent muck of intellectually impoverished Christianity.
He’s also a terrible writer who can’t maintain a train of thought for more than a sentence.
Here’s his opening argument, for instance.
Why do evolutionists spend so much time and effort attacking intelligent design? Not because they think it is wrong and want to “save science” but because they know it to be true and that it will demolish their humanistic world view beliefs. When questions are allowed, it is science. When not, it’s propaganda. True science is evidence-based, as is Christianity. Centuries-old prophecies, of which more than 300 about Jesus were fulfilled, and 1,500 others were mostly fulfilled. The rest are waiting for the apocalypse.
In sum: he knows what ‘evolutionists’ believe; we know that Christianity is true; we are afraid that our “world view” will be destroyed if we admit it. None of that is true. One of the hallmarks of the True Christianity is a complete inability to see the world from another perspective.
It’s the Christians who don’t allow questions…or rather, only tolerate one answer. In that infamous Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, it was Nye who was willing to change his mind given evidence, while it was Ham, who seems to be the source of most of Eggleston’s ideas, who refused to consider the possibility. Eggleston then wanders off into Christian propaganda, claiming that “predictions” from a holy book are evidence, rather than ambiguous claims that have been extensively reinterpreted by apologists, and somehow we’re supposed to believe in an upcoming apocalypse. Focus, man, focus. There are at least a half-dozen assertions in that one paragraph and he can’t back up any of them.
The rest of his long op-ed consists of a string of creationism’s dumbest hits: all of the animal phyla appeared in the Cambrian explosion, there are no transitional forms, quote-mines to claim that well-known evolutionary biologists, like Charles Darwin, Colin Patterson, and Jenny Clack denied the evidence for evolution, and gross misunderstandings of what evolution claims. For example,
They believe billions of years of DNA mutations from nonliving goo somehow spontaneously, in a magical moment, eventually brought humans into existence, a process termed abiogenesis. The evolutionists will cite examples of microevolution as being macroevolution to falsely support their position. Most mutations are fatal.
Nope. No one believes in his “magical moment” that transformed goo into humans.
It’s just too tedious to dissect. And then he ends on nonsense about abortions because, of course, he’s just regurgitating familiar fundamentalist bullshit, and that’s part of the litany.
I am so fed up with the never-ending flood of lies pouring out of stupid old farts like Eggleston, or young farts who have been infected with the pathological poison of this peculiar literalist sect that just shrieks the certainty of their dogma but never pauses to think, and evaluate, and question. A child could see through the entirety of his opinions.
My daughter is having a big Xmas party today, and she doesn’t sound thrilled about it — the in-laws are coming to visit, and she’s doing all the cooking. We’re not adding to the burden though, because she’s in Madison, and a 7 hour drive is just too much for us this week.
Middle son is really far out of reach. He’s in Korea for two weeks!
We were planning on visiting our oldest son in St Cloud, only two hours away, but then we saw the weather alert for Christmas day: “Mixed precipitation expected. Total snow accumulations of up to one inch and ice accumulations of around a tenth of an inch. Winds gusting as high as 40 mph.”
I think Mary and I are trapped together, alone in an icebound house for Xmas day. I don’t exactly have a Xmas feast prepared either, but I did make a simple lentil soup. It’ll help us stay warm.
Meanwhile, several of the webcomics I follow have a tradition of taking a week or two off this time of year, and they make low-effort filler strips that can be weirdly entertaining. Oglaf (NSFW!) has True Slut Adventures, Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) has a Mandatory Xmas Strip, and Questionable Content features a week of Bembo the Bembarian which, this time around, is perfect for me.
We’re all taking it easy (except for poor Skatje) today and this week. I hope you’re all enjoying some slack for the holidays!
I’m working on my class policy for next semester. Last semester was rough — I had bent over backwards to provide maximum flexibility, with an online option and no mandatory attendance, and it was fairly typical to have only half, or less, of the class show up. I considered changing the policy mid-semester, but it was written into the syllabus, so I had to stick with it. There will be changes next term, I tell you what.
This little video illustrates my problem.
I really like the prisoner’s dilemma twist in the middle — if only one student shows up, they pass the course and everyone else fails. There was one day fall term where that could have been invoked.
To answer the question in the title: yes, I’m going to take attendance, and it’s going to count. My big class this spring is going to be heavily interactive, and I’ll need people to show up.
