Cruising around the garden, which is currently swarming with flies, we found a couple of happy arthropods chowing down on the bounty.
Here’s Tetragnatha with the mangled corpse of some kind of fly:
A meadowhawk was standing on some horrible, unrecognizable mass.
There are still plenty of flies available for feasting!
Of course I had to go see the new Supergirl movie — I had to run the projector. It was OK for a superhero movie.
Don’t be fooled by my title. There was no cannibalism in this movie.
Oh look, a transcript below the fold.
I have never attended the Minnesota State Fair, which is a real shame. It has a tremendous reputation, and every year I hear raves about the weird food, the entertainment, the fun atmosphere. I’m afraid, though, that the huge crowds intimidate me. I’d struggle to get parking, would have to deal with the congestion, and it’s a 3 hour drive each way to get there.
The Great American State Fair in Washington DC has no such problem.
Photos and video of the small crowds, a lack of seating and near empty food booths were widely mocked on social media, while the Daily Beast called the event “virtually deserted” and The Atlantic noted in a headline: “The Great American State Fair isn’t very great.”
Maybe I should go? Except I don’t think there’s much to see.
The Great American State Fair is underway at the National Mall to mark the United States’ 250th birthday. But not everything is off to such a great start.
The event has quickly faced problems including power outages, melting ice cream – and a lack of representation from states that declined to send delegations.
While organizers assured visitors all parts of the nation would be represented, at least 10 states and territories refused to participate, with many citing the price tag to send staff to the 16-day event as their reason for opting out.
As usual, everything Trump touches turns to shit.
A reader has asked me to explain Axial Twist Theory. I don’t wanna.
OK, I dug into it a little bit. It’s a crank hypothesis promoted by a tiny number of people; it reminds me of Vortex theory and Lifecode, a couple of comprehensive theories of development proposed by obsessive individuals on the basis of biased interpretations of poor or even bogus observations. Coincidentally, my criticisms of those ideas led to serious threats of lawsuits, which is another strike against them (scientific hypotheses are not defended by lawsuits), and makes me wonder if I’m going to get sued again. No worries, those were not credible threats.
So what is it? There is a web page titled “Axial Twist Theory Explained”, and a Wikipedia page. They’re both terribly written, difficult to wade through, and I suspect both were written by the same person. The theory attempts to explain a phenomenon that doesn’t exist and doesn’t need explanation.
In short, the theory claims that the face and rostral nervous system were rotated during embryonic development and evolution, which they propose to explain the existence of decussations, like the way eyes project to contralateral regions of the central nervous system.
Schema of the proposed development of the axial twist. Developmental phases are (from top to bottom): (1) the embryo turns on its left side; (2) the anterior head grows in the same direction, but the rest of the body grows oppositely into a twist. So that ultimately (3) external bilateral symmetry is regained. Note that there is no evolutionary pressure for internal symmetry so the heart (and other organs) remain asymmetric.
We have no need of this hypothesis, and they have no evidence to support it. It’s that simple.
I’m pretty familiar with the concept of decussations in the nervous system. That’s what I studied in a previous life: my graduate work was on how the spinal cord gets wired up, and there are crossing fibers all up and down the cord. The lab I was in was focused on hindbrain neurons that crossed the midline to innervate contralateral motor outputs. If we needed to twist the whole axis to get them to cross, the whole nervous system would have to be twisted like the rubber band in a model airplane. It makes no sense.
As a post-doc I studied the development of commissural neurons in the grasshopper embryo. Axial Twist Theory confines itself to vertebrate development, so one might argue that grasshoppers are irrelevant, except that insects contain lots of crossing fibers that don’t require whole body twists to explain. It’s simply a functional consequence of needing to integrate both sides of the animal, and the mechanisms for generating it is straightforward molecular signaling that has existed since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates.
But to be fair, let’s look at the research literature. Next problem: it’s negligible. Pubmed turns up one article: Opposite asymmetries of face and trunk and of kissing and hugging, as predicted by the axial twist hypothesis by Marc H.E. de Lussanet. It’s incredibly silly. For instance, bilateral symmetry is imperfect, so they interpret biases as the product of incomplete rotation of the face relative to the back of the head.
Exaggerated schema of the aurofacial asymmetry as predicted by the axial twist theory. During embryology and development, the face elements (red) are predicted to move toward the center from the left, with respect to the mid-plane between the ears.
It gets sillier. Part of the data in that paper was an analysis of photographs on the internet, and an experiment in which people were photographed hugging dolls and were observed in airports. Did I say silly? This is getting creepy.
Examples of left kissing (A) and right hugging (B).
The two schemas show a top view of the opposite behavioral asymmetries.
Apparently, the asymmetry during kissing is different than the asymmetry during hugging, which suggests that there is a twist between face and body. But even that is an ambiguous mess!
The kissing results also confirm the hypothesis and reproduces the findings of airport observations, experiments with dolls, as well as with couples and questionnaires. Earlier studies have revealed clear regional cultural influences: for example in some French cities, as well as in native Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, the kissing bias is reversed, whereas in a conservative muslim country (Bangladesh) the kissing bias is as in the other studies. Also, the bias in kissing and hugging behavior is strongly reduced by emotional contexts. For example, no bias was found in a public kiss between strangers. Thirdly, the kissing bias can be influenced by a lateral head tilt. For example, when kissing a doll head that is either 5° tilted to the right or 15° to the left resulted in a bias of almost 100% to the left and right side of the face respectively. Finally, both the kissing and hugging bias seem to be reduced in left handers
How do you draw conclusions about an embryonic transition that had to have occurred in the Precambrian from a wildly variable behavior in modern humans? The author treats this noise as a solid demonstration of the Axial Twist Hypothesis.
We thus showed that humans also behave as twisted creatures, as predicted by the ATH. Asking people why they kiss or hug this way, or to try it the other way leads to responses such as “it somehow feels better, more natural like this.” We thus tend to kiss as if the ventral side of the face has not quite arrived in the centre, but is still located to the left. Correspondingly, we tend to hug as if the ventral trunk is located to the right of the sagittal plane.
The final strike for me is their gross misinterpretation of zebrafish development. They claim that there is a rotation of the two eyes that fits their model, and they show a single short timelapse.
I spent years staring in a microscope at early, developing zebrafish embryos. No, the eyes don’t rotate around the body axis. In that video, they’re showing a slightly askew perspective on the head and drawing red and blue overlays on the eyes to emphasize an asymmetry inherent in the angle.
I don’t have to explain the Axial Twist Theory because it’s an imaginary phenomenon with no good evidence for it, used to explain poor observations that don’t need a deep evolutionary/embryological foundation.
It was still a little bit entertaining to dive into some bad science.
Sometimes, when volunteering at the local theater, one must sometimes suffer through terrible (but popular) movies. This week was my turn to carry out my obligations. The movie: Jurassic Park. I’ve hated this movie for decades. It brings in money, though, so I sold out my principles.
That doesn’t mean I won’t complain about it, though!
It’s really hard to make humor out of ignorance. These examples are all too close to arguments I routinely and repetitively hear.
Come on, what about whales?
Mary and I were fussing over our “lawn” yesterday. We are required by the city to mow our yard and keep it presentable, as defined by bourgeois expectations, but we’re subverting that. We don’t use any chemicals on it, and we’ve been sowing clover to replace the turf grass. Mary has been most dedicated to replacing the boring stuff with more interesting stuff: she’s got pots of milkweed and other native flora, and yesterday she put me to work tearing up the ‘bad’ grass so she could spend the day transplanting. She’s at work today, and left me with orders to water the new plants.
We have a fenced backyard that would probably be judged criminal, because it’s covered with ‘weeds’ that are a foot or two tall. It’s also full of berry plants. We’re all about feeding the pollinators and birds. This past fall we managed to avoid raking up most of the leaves — leaf litter is an important habitat for overwintering invertebrates.
This video expresses sentiments I share.
You do realize that a thriving population of invertebrates is a necessary prerequisite for vigorous and diverse population of spiders, right? Spiders don’t flourish on endless beds of turf grass.
An Amazing Wolf Spider Man!
It’s in the New York Post, so you know it must be true. They’ve extracted alien corpses from multiple crashed flying saucers, and they’ve been able to taxonomically classify the four different kinds of ET. Conveniently, they all look like they’d be able to be cast for the low-quality make-up capabilities of a TV series on a budget. They’re straight from Dr Who or Star Trek.
Stop laughing.
The Post did their research and found a former Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program advisor and CIA-funded researcher
and quantum physicist
to back them up. Unfortunately, their source Hal Puthoff. Puthoff is an electrical engineer (synonymous with quantum physicist, apparently) and Scientologist who is best known for the infamous Puthoff & Targ “research” on Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute. He has since moved on to promote remote viewing and zero point energy. He’s a notorious kook, so it’s not surprising that he’d happily vouch for those goofy aliens.
Trump is obviously sick and grossly impaired, as everything he touches turns into a disaster and he flails about while incapable of fixing his own catastrophes. I wake up every day hoping that this is the day he finally drops dead or is so brain damaged that he has to be institutionalized, but I don’t know what happens next…President JD Vance? Republicans panicking and getting more extreme in locking in their power? Screaming mobs of MAGA fanatics? Maybe we should hope he lives a few more years in declining effectiveness and then we have a clean transition to an elected, and hopefully Democratic, majority.
There may also be some real advantages to imprisoning the Trump administration in a lame duck presidency for a few more years.
We might have a vision of what comes after in New York: the Democratic Socialists swept the primaries, led by Mamdani’s endorsements.
The mayor-turned-kingmaker had said it was a question of electing “better Democrats” who would “put working people back at the heart of politics”. All three victors are expected to win their safely blue districts, which would send three Mamdani allies into Congress next January.
The outcome was also a recognition of some wider trends in US politics: socialism is no longer a dirty word, criticism of Israel is no longer taboo and dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders in the Donald Trump era runs deep. Voters are thirsty for energy, fight and fresh ideas.
They ask: if Republicans can draw up a Project 2025 and pursue it ruthlessly, why can’t Democrats come up with a Project 2029 that promises universal healthcare, supreme court reform, massive climate investments, a war on the oligarchs and a clear-eyed approach to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?
That’s a vision I could support. Much better than prayer.
Did you know you can join the DSA right now? I predict there is going to be an enrollment surge.
