Wait, what’s weird about them?

Bethany Brookshire is wondering about how to justify writing about weird little animals.

Sometimes, I write about weird animals, I post weird anatomy facts, because I need to feel a little bit of wonder. Curiosity. Joy. I want other people to feel that way too. I know how much we are witnessing. I know how much we need little things to remind us that yes, there’s pain, but there’s joy in this life too. Sometimes, it’s romance novels or bad TV or funny Tiktoks. Sometimes it’s sea squirts. The world is, indeed, awful. But it’s also wonderful, and bizarre, and fun. We need the wonder as much as we need to witness.

I want to reassure everyone that it’s OK to write about bizarre creatures. You know, like odd specialized species that are seeing all the related species in their clade failing so spectacularly that they’re going extinct. Or strangely specialized organisms that have expanded a single organ in their bodies to such a freakishly large size that everything else is diminished in comparison. Or animals with such inefficient and unusual means of locomotion that they persist in despite every predator they’ve got being capable of outrunning them.

So yeah, I guess it’s OK to write about people.

But what’s weird about all the other animals? I spent part of my morning tracing silk to find the teeny-tiny juveniles that are bouncing back from winter, and then I was in the lab hanging out with my girls in the spider colony, and all it takes is an hour of that and you begin wondering why you have so few limbs and such a paltry collection of eyes, and hey, wouldn’t some venom come in handy when you get drafted into a committee meeting? We’re the weird ones, not them.

I’m waiting until we crack the ice on Europa, then maybe we’ll find truly weird critters…or more likely, I’ll start to identify with them and humans will look even more creepy and strange.

Springtime, and one’s thoughts turn to spider breeding

I was walking into work this morning, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the wolf spiders were underfoot, and I saw all these delicate lines of silk draped over everything (once your eye is attuned to spotting silk lines, you discover that they are everywhere, on every fence post and bush.) I stopped by the lab and saw that the temperature in the spider incubators was a comfortable 27°C, and the humidity is rising at last to about 35%, so I checked the colony. Nobody is laying eggs yet, but they are looking plump and healthy and ready for a season of fecundity.

Steatoda triangulosa

Once the semester is truly over, in about a week and a half, I’m going to be doing some matchmaking, and that lovely virgin is going to take a lover.

Arrest those tolerant peaceniks for…something!

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

Dear NYPD: Please, please, please arrest these faculty members, says the free speech warrior.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?

They’re trying to wear me down

I get email from creationists all the time, and it is so discouraging: there are a few people who manage to pump out so much noise and garbage, and there are a few people willing to engage their nonsense, and I guess I’m one of them. But I can’t possibly keep up! For instance, one obnoxious creationist has sent me a couple of links to his horrible website, Darhiwum, which just goes on and on with bogus misinterpretations at endless length. This particular article first quotes Conservapædia, and then explores the author’s misbegotten thesis, which is…let’s see if you can figure it out.

The cause of evolution does not exist in evolution. Evolution as a cause does not contain a response to the cause that makes it consequent. It does not give an account of itself, why is evolution possible in the first place? It is merely a programmed biological process on an assembly line.

“Evolutionary units must know the “trick” of reproducing, they must have heredity, hereditary variation… The basic problem is that the first evolutionary units could not have evolved in an evolutionary way, because they did not have the necessary properties at that time.” /Evolutionary biologist Eőrs Szathmáry/.

Where did they get this “knack” – they have no idea!

A pre-existing ability cannot be developed afterwards, and if the ability to evolve /reproduction, mutation, variation, natural selection, heredity/ is not there in the first place, the evolutionary process cannot even start. Evolution can only work if all its components are present and working simultaneously. Where do we get these capabilities by which the alleged evolution takes place?

First, I have to get something out of the way, this contemptible habit creationists have of quote-mining scientists. Eőrs Szathmáry is a theoretical biologist who published with John Maynard Smith, wrote articles presenting the mechanisms for evolution, and was never arguing for creationism. This creationist, though, throws out a mishmash of Conservapædia and established scientists to somehow lard his ideas with some trace of authority.

Their article goes on for thousands of words, but their central stupid idea is that evolution needed to evolve a specific mechanism for mutation, but evolution cannot proceed without mutation. Error is apparently intentional and designed; error is the “capability” that needs to be put in place by design.

I tried to read this bozo’s work with an open mind, but as it sank in what he was trying to argue, I realized that he was just stupid and not worth the effort.

Better send in the riot squad

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t sen the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Jewish students celebrating Passover with the protesters.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

TV killed journalism in America

I’m glad Jon Stewart is around to point out the absurdity of our news media.

Yes. Following Donald Trump’s car on his commute to the court is not news. Reporting breathlessly on the courtroom artist’s rendering of the scene is not news. Endlessly describing what Trump, a man who hasn’t changed his wardrobe in decades, looks like is not news. Reporting on the ongoing minutiae of court procedure is not news. It’s all boring stuff that could be summarized in 5 minutes at the end of the day…and on days when nothing dramatic happens (that is, most of them), it’s overkill.

I did not care for the short segment near the end when Jessica Williams complains that Stewart is being a killjoy. Just let the press have “fun,” she says, it’s entertainment. The consequences of this trial may be important. It’s a serious matter. And our bored journalists are stretching out the thin daily story into a tedious, superficial gloss on the substance of the trial. Who needs to consider corruption when can instead talk about whether Trump is “glowering” or “pouting” while he’s sitting there?

Just another spring day on campus

Here is a typical gathering of UMM students, honoring the god of electricity.

UMN Morris is a clean energy leader and destination. We are carbon neutral in electricity. UMN Morris produces more clean electricity per student of any campus in the United States.
-100% carbon neutral electric status achieved in 2020
-1,000,000 lbs + of organic waste diverted from landfills by campus and community
composting program
-10 Million kWh electricity produced each year by two wind turbines
-Gold STAR rating (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher
Education)

I am stumped by the logistics

I honestly tried to give this Netflix movie, Rebel Moon: the Scargiver, a chance. I made it about halfway before giving up in boredom.

It’s a sci-fi fantasy story about a rag-tag group of deadly warriors defeating an empire…prosaic enough so far. But what totally killed it for me, besides the deadly dull characters and ridiculous stakes, was the logistics. There is the gigantic, ultra-powerful galactic empire, you see, and the local governor sends this gigantic starship crewed entirely by psycho Nazis, to collect…grain. That’s the macguffin here, bags of grain. This grain is the output of a small village of maybe 30 vaguely North European farmers who harvest it over the course of less than a week, so we’re not even talking about megatonnes of vital foodstuff to feed a planet or two. Nope, just a bunch of sacks of grain that the farmers can pile into a single building in their village.

An immense starship appears, so large that it looms over the village while hanging in low orbit, and then the stupid slow-mo fighting with swords and clubs and farm implements and a few rifles against a robotic army of multi-barreled tanks and armies of space nazis and I see from the synopses that the peasants win.

None of this makes any sense, but there are two movies in this series and a third threatened. There are also going to be “director’s cut” versions of this thing released, as if it deserves further attention. This is garbage of Hugo Gernsback quality, illiterate hackery. How does Zack Snyder get away with it?

You know, the first thing a good science fiction movie should have is a competent, compelling writer generating the ideas behind its premise and execution. I guess since Star Wars got away with neglecting that component, though, nobody thinks it’s necessary any more.