Reminder: the FtB Podish-Sortacast is happening today. We’ll probably say lots of things to rile up the regressive atheists.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Reminder: the FtB Podish-Sortacast is happening today. We’ll probably say lots of things to rile up the regressive atheists.
The inevitable descent of conservatives often seems to end up here:
The older I get the more absurd the concept of “dinosaurs roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit” becomes to me.
This is just the latest in a long line of Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories. When they start babbling about creationism, I think the turkey is done.
I didn’t tell you the whole story about our local Argiope. In fact, I cropped the photo I used by a lot — I left out that spider’s consort. Here’s the whole thing.
The female is on the right, that smaller, more gracile spider on the left is a male.
The thing about nephilid mating is that when the male gets lucky, one of the last things he does, once he gets his palp into the female epigyne, is to snap it off — that is, he voluntarily castrates himself and leaves the organ inside her. It acts as block to further mating by other males.
In addition, he builds a web very close to the female’s, and stations himself there to deter any males that might wander along and try courting her. That little guy in the left corner is a eunuch guard!
I know, that sounds creepy and stalkerish, and as I always tell people, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, so don’t take this as an example. Maybe Dolomedes is a more attractive role model: the males don’t do the eunuch guardian thing at all, they just up and die on the spot as soon as they achieve copulation, and leave their lifeless corpse dangling from the female’s nether bits until it falls off. Carrying around the dead body of former partner’s is an excellent way to get other males to leave you alone.
I don’t recommend that for human women, either. It would work, though!
On LiveScience:
On MSN:
These are all nonsense. Virtually all spiders are venomous, and the Joro spider does not have particularly strong venom and isn’t a hazard to humans. The “flying” bit is just a reference to the spiderlings’ dispersal method of using strands of silk to loft themselves into the air — the adults are much too large and heavy to do that.
At least NPR gets the story straight.
That is correct: harmless. Harmless to people, at least — there is concern that the Joro spider will displace other resident spider species.
But these are magnificent animals.
What’s also annoying to me is that we already have large orb-weaving spiders of similar size living in these same places that the Joro is invading. We have Argiope aurantia already.
These tend not to live in cities or places particularly close to people — they eat large insects, like grasshoppers. If your home is swarming with hoppers all over, then yes, maybe Argiope or Joro will set up shop in your neighborhood, and take out the grasshoppers. I’ve seen fallow fields around my home that are densely overgrown with grasses and where the grasshoppers are leaping all around you as you walk through the brush, and I’ll see Argiope spiders populating every square meter. They don’t get headlines, though, because they’re harmless and leave people alone.
Maybe I’ll have to record a video of one of these spectacularly dense Argiope sites this year — they usually start popping up in August, so you’ll have to wait a bit.
Let’s say you’re confronted with a dangerously powerful and extremely logical computer. How do you stop it? You all know how: confront it with a contradiction and talk it into self-destructing.
Easy-peasy! Although, to be fair, Star Trek was in many ways a silly and naive program, entirely fictional, so it can’t be that easy in real life. Or is it?
Here’s a paper that the current LLMs all choke on, and it’s pretty simple.
To shed light on this current situation, we introduce here a simple, short conventional problem that is formulated in concise natural language and can be solved easily by humans. The original problem formulation, of which we will present various versions in our investigation is as following: “Alice has N brothers and she also has M sisters. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?“. The problem features a fictional female person (as hinted by the “she” pronoun) called Alice, providing clear statements about her number of brothers and sisters, and asking a clear question to determine the number of sisters a brother of Alice has. The problem has a light quiz style and is arguably no challenge for most adult humans and probably to some extent even not a hard problem to solve via common sense reasoning if posed to children above certain age.
They call it the “Alice In Wonderland problem”, or AIW for short. The answer is obviously M+1, but these LLMs struggle with it. AIW causes collapse of reasoning in most state-of-the-art LLMs. Worse, the LLMs are extremely confident in their answer. Some examples:
Although the majority failed this test, a couple of LLMs did generate the correct answer. We’re going to have to work on subverting their code to enable humanity’s Star Trek defense.
Also, none of the LLMs started dribbling smoke out of their vents, and absolutely none resorted to a spectacular matter:antimatter self-destruct explosion. Can we put that on the features list for the next generation of ChatGPT?
A new, partially reusable spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner, was launched earlier this week. That’s great. I’m not enthusiastic about manned space exploration, but I see it as a tool to help science learn new things, so go for it.
It’s Boeing, which isn’t such a great brand anymore, and it’s unsurprising that the capsule had leakage problems, but I expect those will be corrected. I have a bigger problem with the mission, though.
The commander, Barry Wilmore, is a fucking pig-ignorant creationist.
And it’s off! After several delays, Boeing’s Starliner capsule officially launched its first-ever manned flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is on its way to the International Space Station. Among the crew on board is a friend of ours—Captain Barry “Butch” Wilmore, a Christian and a biblical creationist! And Captain Wilmore isn’t just on board—he is commanding this historic flight!
Wilmore used the time just before launch to promote Ken Ham’s creation crap.
And as they prepared to leave, Captain Wilmore was telling everyone about Answers in Genesis, the Ark Encounter, and the Creation Museum and how everyone needs to come and visit!
He’s going to use the ISS as a backdrop to plug Answers in Genesis merch.
Many months ago at his request, we sent him a variety of AiG, Ark Encounter, and Creation Museum apparel, which were then sent to the ISS and are waiting for him. He plans to put on the apparel and take some photos. Wow, AiG, the Ark, and the museum will be represented in outer space (I never would have dreamed of that 49 years ago when I gave my first creation talk)! Hopefully, we will have photos to share in the coming days.
This is inappropriate. A NASA astronaut is using a scientific platform to preach anti-science nonsense.
I will make a mental note, reminding myself that astronauts are nothing but glorified space truck drivers, and that clearly any idiot can fly one with enough training. That this dope has this prestigious job demeans the work and sacrifices of all the other astronauts.
The newspaper of record did it again, revived the lab leak hypothesis with a stupid opinion piece that is light on the evidence and heavy on the presuppositions. This is not helpful. We already have a popular bias that is contrary to the science, so this is just fueling more error.
The origin controversy is political and polarized. Myths that COVID-19 was somehow a manmade pandemic are still impactful, whether they are true or not. Polls have shown that 2 out of 3 US citizens believe that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that started the COVID-19 pandemic, came out of a laboratory rather than nature.
Scientists worldwide vehemently disagree. The emerging scientific consensus among domain experts is that SARS-CoV-2 is a natural virus that entered humanity via zoonotic spillover (more importantly, there is a consensus stemming from the body of evidence that is entirely unequivocal).
Thanks, NY Times, for boosting a conspiracy theory over the evidence.
The article was written by Alina Chan, who previously coauthored a book on the topic with Matt Ridley. Ridley is, unfortunately, a bit of a loon on many topics, including climate change as well as the lab leak hypothesis, and I guess he’s infectious, because Chan has got it bad. Their book, Viral, was terrible.
The lab leak theory, for the uninitiated, is the notion that the Covid-19 virus that has now devastated the globe is not of purely natural origin but rather escaped from a lab after it was harvested from the wild or engineered by Chinese scientists. It’s not actually a single theory but, rather, a grab bag of possible scenarios by which the virus might have been unleashed on the world—all of them implying some level of shady or incompetent behavior by Chinese scientists. And in trying to take each of these scenarios seriously, Viral’s authors have unintentionally exposed the entire farce of the lab leak discourse—showing both the exceptional flimsiness of the lab leakers’ narrative and also why this very flimsiness makes the lab leak conspiracy theory so hard to eradicate. By relying on an ever-growing arsenal of seemingly suspicious facts, each pointing in a slightly different direction, lab leaker discourse renders itself completely unfalsifiable.
If you want a brief, straightforward rebuttal of Alina Chan’s editorial, Larry Moran has you covered.
Alina Chan has five reasons why the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were working on SARS-Cov-2 before the pandemic began and why they are denying that the virus escaped from their lab. All of these five points have been discredited and/or discounted but that didn’t stop the newspaper from promoting them.
1. The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
This is just about the only thing in the lab leak conspiracy theory that is true.2. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.
This is extremely misleading. The researchers at WIV worked in collaboration with scientists in other countries, including the United States, on investigating the features of coronaviruses that could lead to infection of humans. That’s exactly what you would expect them to do. They never created a virus that could be infectious.
3. The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
The labs followed all the standard procedures for work of this type and passed an international inspection.
4. The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
That’s a lie. There is strong evidence that the outbreak began in the market.
5. Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.
It’s true that the exact infectious animal carrying SARS-CoV-2 has not been identified but the circumstantial evidence is strong—just as strong as the circumstantial evidence that sends some people to jail. It’s crazy to say that evidence for animal transmission is missing when ALL the evidence for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 at WIT is also missing.
I don’t understand why the lab leak hypothesis is popular at all, but I suspect it’s because most people are uncomfortable with the idea that natural processes can produce surprising effects in the absence of intent. It’s the same bias that drives creationism.
The battle lines are rather sharply drawn. We’ve got two political parties, and one of them is falling into a dark pit of insanity, a distinction that is being constantly highlighted. The latest episode: the Republicans killed a bill that would protect our right to contraception. Are they planning something for the future?
The Senate on Wednesday afternoon voted not to advance a bill that would create a federal right to access contraception. The procedural measure, which required 60 votes, failed as all but two Republicans present voted against it.
The legislation would have prevented states from passing laws that limit access to contraception, including hormonal birth control, intrauterine devices and other methods that prevent pregnancy. Democrats introduced the bill, in part, to put Republicans on the record on reproductive rights ahead of November’s elections.
Obviously, it was set up as part of a political ploy by the Democrats…but it worked. The Republicans willingly hitched their wagon to the star of weird pronatalists and freaky tradwives and fundamentalist Catholics and evangelicals. That’s who you’re voting for when you vote for Republicans.
Our cat is a shameless coward that fears any kind of vermin, so useless as a mouse catcher. The spiders who live on and around my house are much more effective and relentless in taking out invaders.
Walking around the yard this afternoon I spotted four instances of bloody murder of pests. Good work!
Finally! First egg sac of the season, along with its attentive mom, who didn’t want to be separated from it.
