Weep for Oklahoma

The state of Oklahoma ranks 49th in education, according to one review (there are many such reviews that come up with different values, but none of them place the state higher than near the bottom of the barrel.) The superintendent of the Oklahoma school system, Ryan Walters, is surely aware of their abysmal reputation, and surely wants to make the schools in his state better, right? That’s his job! Walters has taken bold, radical action to fix Oklahoma schools.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued a directive to all public schools ordering them to incorporate the Bible as an instructional support in the classroom.

Doing so is a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country, Walters said.
…
In remarks to the board, Walters went further than his own memo, saying that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.

If I were teacher in Oklahoma, this is the point where I’d be sending my CV to schools in other states, and be preparing a lesson plan that, if I had to stay in the state for a while, would reveal what a pile of archaic shit the Bible was. That counts as teaching from the Bible, right?

The sad thing is that there are a lot of conservative Republicans who heard Ryan Walters’ plan and clutched their precious Bible and shouted “Hallelujah!” because they’re religious dumbasses, and they would run any teacher who criticized their holy book out of town.

Even sadder: thanks to the Republicans, the rest of the country wants to become Oklahoma.

Minnesota weird: we don’t have any native tarantulas!

Marisa Simonetti is a candidate in Edina, Minnesota running for the Hennepin County board. She is supposedly a real estate agent, but her license has been revoked, and she’s been accused of “fraudulent, deceptive and dishonest practices” — she’s been engaged in some shenanigans where she rents homes via AirB&B and then turns around and rents them to others. But worst of all, Simonetti is cruel to spiders.

Hennepin County Board candidate Marisa Simonetti said Thursday that none of the things that have recently landed her in headlines, including tossing a live tarantula at a tenant and allegations of fraud, are in conflict with her campaign themes of family values and being tough on crime.

The tarantula was rescued by the police and seems to be OK.

You will be shocked to learn that she is the Republican candidate for county office.

Joe must go

It used to be that the big political conventions were NOT PR sessions in which the Chosen One was anointed — the convention was where it was decided who would represent the party. There was back-room wheeling and dealing, the party leaders would negotiate and make promises, it was an ugly opportunity for corruption, and it might completely disregard the will of the people settled in primaries and caucuses.

I think we need to bring that kind of convention back.

In the debate last night, Joe Biden demonstrated that he’s not fit to run the country. Trump is worse, but pitting a doddering old man against a lying sleaze monster is no way to decide how to run a country. Both sides of that “debate” were disgracefully bad and an embarrassment to the USA. In August, the Democratic National Convention will meet in August, and it’s expected to be a rubber stamp event. “Democrats will rally around Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ nomination for President and Vice President of the United States,” says the DNC…but what if they don’t? What if all the representatives from around the country get together with their mandate to present policies favored by the people and then choose the best person to stand for office? That’s not an unusual way for political systems to work.

I’m with Jon Stewart on the debate. I watched it with an increasingly appalled feeling, and was angry by the end of it. Neither of those men should have any power. Trump needs to be in prison, while Biden needs to retire to a rocking chair on his porch.

I’m also pissed off by the incompetence Biden demonstrated after the debate.

Asked by a reporter how he thought he did during Thursday’s night debate during a post-game stop at a Waffle House in Atlanta, President Joe Biden said, “I thought we did well.”

No, Joe. You did very, very poorly.

I agree with Mehdi Hasan: Joe Biden has to go. We need a brokered convention in August.

You know, another bonus to doing that is that it would kill these long drawn-out ridiculous horse races that start a few years before the election. Make the final selection in August, and the campaign season begins then and ends in November.

I shouldn’t be watching the debate

But here I am. For sure, no one jacked up Biden on drugs before this thing started. He’s coming off as slow, old, and fumbling.

Meanwhile, Trump just lies and exaggerates, while Biden looks on like he’s stunned. Debates don’t get fact-checked apparently.

Not looking good.

Trump couldn’t answer any question, except with lies, and he was constantly turning every response into claims about immigration. The only problem we have is millions of people pouring over the border, apparently. It was most glaring when he was asked about climate change and he had nothing to say except immigration, immigration, immigration.

Fucking Christ. Trump brought up his “cognitive test” again — those things only assess a minimal level of function. He did not “ace” them. You can’t ace that kind of test.

Biden was competent in his policy answers, but dear god, he is reinforcing the idea that he’s old.

Final impression is that in Trump’s world, America is failing and is on the brink of WWIII, while Biden is planning to be a caretaker president, a bureaucrat coasting to the retirement. The whole affair was uninspiring, and there was not one spark of charisma anywhere.

Speaking of caretakers coasting to the end, Bash and Tapper were pointless and ineffectual — there was no moderation to speak of.

I hate debates.

Why I left Facebook

It hurts so much when friends and family post this sort of thing.

Devout Christians have found by looking through a microscope a gene in your D and A that makes you an atheist. It’s the Satan gene what do you say to that atheists Satan made you this way so god must be real

You can’t argue with that. All you can do is close the window, delete your facebook account, send a hit squad of clowns armed with pies to Zuckerberg’s house, and resign from the human race.

Poopology

I have read some terrible things about biology, and the worst is everything about excretion. I can’t even blame evolution — it’s all physics and thermodynamics and chemistry, in which the extraction of energy from the environment is always going to produce waste products. Even photosynthesis pumps out lots of destructive free radicals, and animals are the kings of inefficiency, making all this crap (literally) that they fling out into the environment for someone else to take care of.

I learned more than I wanted to from this article on How to Poop Correctly. It’s an art, and we’re all doing it wrong.

The stool takes time to move into the right position to come down through the anal canal, which is why you shouldn’t try to force a poop when you don’t feel the urge. Many people will try to push a poo out in the mornings before they leave for school or work.

It’s also common for people to use coffee and cigarettes, which increase the production of certain hormones and neurotransmitters that trigger bowel peristalsis (involuntary muscle movement), to encourage their body to move the poop down faster. This isn’t a great idea, as your body can become dependent on these substances to shit, and they diminish the normal movement of the bowel.

Frequently, when things aren’t moving as quickly as you’d like them to, it’s not that you’re constipated – it’s just that the stool hasn’t moved into the rectum yet. However, when you do feel the urge, you need to respond to your body’s message as soon as possible. Every time you hold it in, your stool inches a little way back up, and your rectum reabsorbs some of the water from the stool, drying it out and making it harder to push out when you finally allow yourself to go. Don’t hold it. For a lot of you, this will mean getting over your reluctance to use public restrooms. Coffee shops and high-end hotels often offer clean, safe refuge.

But that article doesn’t deal with the big problem. It only covers moving waste through your body and out to, for instance, a “high-end hotel”. Then it’s their problem. It’s not over yet, though. Here’s a study that looked at the geyser of fecal material produced by flushing.

Our study demonstrated that lid position (up or down) prior to flushing of household or public toilets of United States design seeded with MS2 bacteriophage had no significant effect on the MS2 cross contamination of household restroom surfaces. MS2 was recovered from all restroom surfaces tested, and lid closure had no impact on the results. The most effective strategies for reducing restroom cross-contamination associated with toilet flushing include the addition of a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and the use of disinfectant/detergent dispensers in the toilet tank. To reduce the risk associated with exposure to contaminated fomites in the restroom, regular disinfection of all restroom surfaces following toilet brushing, and/or use of a disinfectant that leaves residual microbicidal activity is suggested particularly when the household is occupied by an individual with an active infection with a virus, such as norovirus, causing acute gastroenteritis. Because many viral infections may be asymptomatic, this is even more important in health care facilities where immunocompromised individuals are often present.

Lid up, lid down, it doesn’t matter — you’re either going to get a plume of nastiness shooting upwards or out sideways. Coffee shops and high-end hotels are looking increasingly less attractive, because you’re just going to be wading through someone else’s fecal ejecta.

I shouldn’t read this stuff.

Also, I’m scheduling a colonoscopy for mid-August — the doctor wants me to come in the day before classes start for it. At least I’d be beginning the semester with a clean start.

Why you need guard spiders to protect your home

I just got my hands on Biology of Spiders by Rainer Foelix, and it’s very, very good…but beware, it’s an academic text, so the prices swing widely with the source and the edition, with some sources seeming to expect you’re sitting on a half million dollar grant so you’re not concerned with the cost. That’s not me, so I was happy to find a copy for $12 at Half-Price Books. Hooray for used book stores!

Anyway, I spent a pleasant morning starting to dig into this book. It’s technical and gets into a tremendous amount of detail on anatomy & physiology & behavior, and I was genuinely happy to see that it doesn’t get bogged down in the taxonomy wars. Only the last chapter is on Phylogeny and Systematics, and it’s short, and begins with a warning.

Now a book on biology is hardly the place to insert a chapter on classification.

W.S. Bristow, 1938

Despite Bristow’s warning, it seems necessary to cover the descent and classification of spiders briefly. I must admit, however, that our real knowledge of the phylogeny of spiders is very scanty, and hence to present any reliable pedigree is quite impossible.

Yes! My kind of biology text!

It saves the lengthy discussions for the good stuff, like this.

…only about 20-30 of the 34,000 species of spiders are dangerously poisonous to man (Schmidt, 1973; Maretic, 1975).

The prime example is certainly the black widow spider, Latrodectus mactans, from the family Theridiidae. The bite itself is not particularly painful and often is not even noticed (Maretic, 1983, 1987). The first real pain is felt after 10-60 minutes in the regions of the lymph nodes, from where it spreads to the muscles. Strong muscle cramps develop and the abdominal muscles become very rigid (this is an important diagnostic feature!).Another typical symptom is a contorted facial expression, called facies latrodectismi, which revers to a flushed, sweat-covered face, swollen eyelids, inflamed lips, and contracted masseter muscles. If the breathing muscles of the thorax become affected, this can eventually lead to death. Besides the strong muscle pain, black widow spider venom (BWSV) also elicits psychological symptoms, which range from anxiety feelings to actual fear of death. Apparently the toxin can pass the blood-brain barrier and directly attack the central nervous system.

Without any treatment the symptoms will last for about 5 days and a complete recovery may take weeks. About 50 years ago, lethality was 5% in the USA (Thorp and Woodson, 1945), but is now less than 1% (Zahl, 1971). The best treatment against a bite from a black widow is a combination of calcium gluconate and antivenin (e.g., Lyovac; McCrone and Netzloff, 1965) injected intraveously. Calcium causes the pain to subside quickly and the antidote binds to the toxin. The patient feels relieved within 10-20 minutes and will completely recover in a few hours.

The poison (BWVS) is a neurotoxin that affects the neuromuscular endplates, but also synapses in the CNS. The synaptic vesicles become completely depleted, causing a permanent blockage of the synapse (Clark et al., 1972; Griffiths and Smyth, 1973; Tzeng and Siekevitz, 1978; Wanke et al., 1986). One component of the poison (α-Latrotoxin) binds to a presynaptic receptor of cholinergic synapses (Meldolesi at al., 1986).

Neat-o! This is my kind of biology book, although you can tell from the dates of the references that it’s a bit old — there hasn’t been a death from a black widow bite since 1983, but I won’t mention that on any of the signage around my house.