Good Morning Spider!

It’s Thursday, which means it’s my spider clean up day — feeding and removing withered dead corpses from their vials, and also bottle-washing and general tidying up.

I’ve also been working on compiling some resources for students, since in a few months I have to sit down with a few of them and teach them how to identify spiders (challenging, since I’m a novice myself). For everyone’s general edification, here’s a short list of websites with taxonomic information:

Of course I also have a couple of printed field guides. I’m eager for the spring thaw and an opportunity to go chase spiders.

What happens when philosophers & biologists talk about a movie? Turns out they don’t talk about the movie much

If you were following the podcast Philosophers in Space with Aaron and Thomas and, last week, me, we continue our discussion this week, with 0G47: Annihilation and Deep Ecology, Part 2. Strangely, we don’t talk much about the movie Annihilation this week, and instead focus on philosophy and evolution and ecology. Dive in and listen, it’s loads of fun.

Congratulations on joining the club, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

She has had an asteroid named after her, 23238 Ocasio-Cortez. Next time I’m in DC or NY, we’ll have to get together and compare space rocks, since I’m proud to say that 153298 Paulmyers is my namesake. I wonder how close those rocks are to each other? Probably not as close as Minnesota and the East coast.

There’s actually a legitimate scientific basis for honoring Ocasio-Cortez this way.

Evans and Stokes decided to keep things “honorable” by handing out asteroid names to the winners of top science and engineering fairs for students.

“We didn’t want to make it willy-nilly. We wanted to keep it exclusive,” Evans told Business Insider. She said first- and second-place winners of three major student competitions, plus some teachers and mentors, get naming rights.

Ocasio-Cortez took second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007, when she was a high school student. Yay! In biology! ONE OF US, ONE OF US!

“A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely due to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes.”

See? This is why we don’t invite mygalomorphs and scolopendrids to any of our parties. They tend to eviscerate and decapitate and consume innocent visitors and splatter fluids all over everything. The Araneomorphae are much tidier, wrapping up their victims in silk and then neatly puncturing them and sucking out their guts. It’s the difference between an axe murderer and the gangster who lays down plastic before executing his enemy. Who would you rather have at a social event?

I ☠️ flat-earthers

I refuse to watch this new Netflix documentary, Behind the Curve, because even if it is ripping ruthlessly into those idjits, it’s giving them more attention than they deserve. They’re also intellectually dishonest.

One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn’t actually rotate.

Except… It does.

“What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift,” Knodel explains. “A 15-degree per hour drift.

“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem.’

“We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”

You know what they say: If your experiment proves you wrong, just disregard the results!

“We don’t want to blow this, you know?” Knodel then says to another Flat Earther. “When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.

“If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad.

“What I just told you was confidential.”

Wow. They spent $20,000 on an instrument that they then chose to ignore. As one of those small college scientists who is trying to patch together gear on little bitty $400, $600 grants, and who bought a microscope camera for $2000 out of his own pocket, I’m more than a little appalled. Next time someone decides to drop a chunk of money on some crackpot, could they just send it to me, instead? I’ll use it responsibly.

If nothing else, that kind of money would fund summer research projects for at least six students, and would help produce competent scientists for the future.

Did you expect brand loyalty from a spider?

No one is surprised, instead all the arachnologists are thinking “Cool!” Scientists in the Amazon captured a video of a mygalomorph spider chowing down on a young mammal. Mygalomorphs (tarantulas, funnel web spiders, trap door spiders) are big arthropods that will kill and eat anything about their size that they can ambush, so they’ll eat other arthropods, small birds, reptiles, and yes, mammals.

You probably shouldn’t eat ET

Charlie Jane Anders says that if we meet intelligent Space Aliens, we’d probably try to eat them (and we shouldn’t). I agree, because people are horrible, but I also think we shouldn’t because at the least we’re going to get Space Diarrhea, but we’re probably just going to get Space Death.

Anyway, I made a video. Unfortunately, I didn’t script it, but just charged off extemporaneously, which means it ended up about an hour long. Sorry. College professor. Wind me up, I talk for an hour about anything.

The summary: earth life maintains mutual compatibility (more or less) because of its common origin, 4 billion years of co-evolution, and because specialization and cooperation maximizes efficient extraction of resources. Aliens have none of that, and are quite likely to have diverged biochemically in ways that are inherently inimical to our biochemistry, and we have not had any opportunity to adapt to their differences. I also suggest that one hypothesis to explain the so-called Fermi Paradox is that habitable worlds evolve such different detailed chemistries that they are basically tainted toxic soups to other species, and that any sensible starfaring species would flag stellar systems with living biospheres with a great big biohazard symbol. Mars-like worlds which lack any native life (presumably) but are terraformable might be the optimal target for human colonization.

Now to print a few of these out and post them around the science building…

It’s hard to recruit students for research projects when you’re off on sabbatical. I’ve got one lined up so far, but I have ambitious plans for the summer and would like to get one or two more, so I’ve put together a recruitment poster.

Maybe I should have used a scientifically accurate close-up of a spider face instead of something bright and cartoony, but I have to get them into the lab first. Then they’ll learn to love our new arachnid reality.