“Ancient Aliens” can go eat a bag of dicks

I did not enjoy making this video at all, not because of the content, because of all the copyright bullshit YouTube put me through. I use a few very short clips from the History Channel show, Ancient Aliens, specifically to criticize the stupidity therein, and I guess the History Channel is very protective of their idiocy, and the thing kept getting flagged. I finally said screw it, demonetize it, I’m not going to let that channel of lies and foolishness push me around.

So here it is, for what it’s worth. I hate the History Channel, alien pseudoscience, and Giorgio Tsoukalos even more now.

Do I include a sorta partial script of what I said, below the fold? Yes, I do.

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Coincidences!

Well, good for Clallam County (if you have no idea where that is, it’s on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state. Port Angeles? Nirvana? Does that help?). They voted for Biden, and now have a 40 year winning streak in ‘predicting’ the outcome of presidential elections.

Clallam County is on quite the winning streak — one that no other county in the United States can claim.

According to the latest count on Monday from the Clallam County Auditor’s office, 50.43% of voters cast their ballot for former Vice President Joe Biden and 46.72% voted for President Donald Trump.

That means the county has picked the correct presidential winner in every race since 1980.

Going into this election cycle, Clallam County was just one of 19 counties nationwide to hold that voting record.

With just over 50% of the county’s votes going to Biden, it is now the only county in the country to have kept up such a winning streak.

The county residents don’t know how they are so good at this. I have an explanation, though: it’s chance.

40 years is just ten presidential elections. Because of the way our system works, it’s a binary choice, basically — so like a coin flip. The likelihood of calling 10 coin flips in a row is 1 in 1024. There are more than 1000 counties in the country, so I’d guess that the chance of one of them having a ten election streak is pretty good. Also the fact that it’s not really a 50:50 chance — one outcome proves to be slightly more likely after the fact — and that Clallam has a nice demographic mix, with the slightly urban Port Angeles plus all the conservative loggers and fishers, and it’s not surprising at all.

Then, of course, look what xkcd posted:

None of that will prevent Washington state journalists from descending on Clallam county in 2024.

Last 3 weeks!

The end is in sight! I’ve laid out all my lectures for this final part of my cell biology course.

  • This week: cell signaling.
  • Next week: multicellularity and cell motility.
  • Final week: cell origins.

It may seem weird to end the semester trying to answer where cells come from, but I’ve found that they need to know a lot of basic stuff about chemistry and metabolism before it all makes sense.

Now that I’ve got complete plans for the remainder of the course content, I can focus on just grading, my least favorite part of teaching, which means that now on top of sky-high stress levels I get to add nonstop tedium and misery. At least class itself should be fine! Maybe I should just stop handing out assignments so the work doesn’t pile up.

Next, though, a take-home exam comes due tomorrow, and I have vowed to get it completely graded by Friday. The nightmare continues.

Wow, Quantum Eraser was even worse than I imagined

Time for another Bad Science Sunday, and this time I followed up on the threat of a video by some gomer calling himself Quantum Eraser. I “watched” it. It was unwatchable. It’s basically a braying ass shouting “logical error” at every statement about scientific evidence, without following through and stating what the error was, or even addressing the evidence in any way. So I made a video, and along the way I bomb you with my opinions about science communication, because this guy was basically the antithesis of good teaching.

Oh, yeah, I also sorta kinda included a partial script, below the fold.

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Well, that was strange

I was in the lab, feeding the baby spiders, when I discovered something peculiar. I popped to tops on the spider vials, and they were fine, all placid and polite and saying “please” and “thank you” and just being all around delightful boys and girls, like always.

Then I gathered up a bunch of flies, and they were freaked out and hyper. Usually I can rely on them to scurry to the edge of the container, where I flick them one by one to the spiders. Not today! They were rushing about, charging the opening, and leaping to their doom by themselves, which was bad, because flies are stupid, and without my assist they often miss the open vials. It also made it difficult to control how many flies went to each spider, so some are feasting well, others got their usual fare, and more flies than usual ended up running off to feed the feral spiders living in my lab.

It was as if they’d heard that their Lord had become a crappy one term president, and they’d all decided to run in circles, scream and shout. They all still ended up juice in the guts of a spider, and eventually multicolored poop spots on the floor of a cage.

Which reminds me, I’ve got a major lab cleanup ahead of me, which I’m not going to have time to do until the semester is over. I hope the flies settle down and resign themselves to their fate by then.

Behold! Light box Mk II!

Last week, Ade & I “built” (I use the word loosely) a space cocoon out of aluminum foil to control the illumination of our experimental spiders. It worked, clumsily, and it looked hideous.


Today, we took a Great Leap Forward and advanced the cause of Spider Containment and Illumination technology by building Light Box Mk II. It is beautiful and elegant.

We constructed it with frame of Space Age™ PVC pipe, covered with sheets of Cutting Edge™ Black FoamCore, the edges sealed with Advanced Technology™ adhesive backed metallic fabric…in other words, cardboard and duct tape. It looks damned fine, though. We’ve got a spider in a cage beneath a NoIR camera in there, and Ade is caught in the act of activating our time-lapse software on the Raspberry Pi so we can quantify it’s behavior night and day. Our sole obstacle to doing Great Science is now the spider: our Mk I may have been clumsy, but it did work, and unfortunately this particular spider cowered out of sight* almost the whole time the computer eye in the sky was staring down at her. We’re doing another trial run now.

Another bonus is that we made the box fairly roomy, and we could eventually put 3 or 4 spiders in separate cages in there. We only have the one camera right now, though, so that will have to wait.

*Of course, a spider refusing to behave is still data in a behavioral observation, so that was fine.

Spiders!

It kills me that every time I see a splendid spider photo, I can’t share it here — too many people are freaked out by arachnophobia. I wish I could cure it by constantly rubbing more spiders in your faces, but I know that doesn’t work, so I’ll just gently point you in the direction of a couple of collections of gorgeous spiders, and you can choose to go look, if you want.

The Great Fox Spider has been rediscovered in Britain! These are related to wolf spiders, so you probably know what they look like, but it has the most wonderful mottled markings. I know some people are fans of the more garishly colorful spiders, like peacock jumpers, but I’ve come to appreciate the subtlety of the more variable and muted markings, like the ones I see on Parasteatoda. If you must do something bold, go for something simple and clean, like the distinctive swoosh on Steatoda borealis.

You want more variety? Check out Science Friday’s collection of spider photos. My favorite there is the Pirate Spider — there’s something about a gracile spider with delicate line art on its body and long bristling spikes on its legs that I find appealing. But if you’re into big bearish brute mygalomorphs, get an eyeful of that black purse-web spider with its massive chelicerae.

One more photo I wish I had: yesterday, Mary spotted a tiny juvenile cellar spider descending on a strand of silk, and she brought it to me (I’m desperate to see more live spiders, it’s gotten too cold for them). I tried to catch it by snaring its thread, but it got away fast before I could get my camera ready. We think it landed on my pants. So while I didn’t get a picture, I’ve got that going for me, that maybe a baby spider has taken up residency in my clothing. It’s too bad I’m not going to be able to do laundry, ever.

Man, it’d be easier to be a popular blogger if I had an obsession with cats.

Did native Americans have more equality 9000 years ago than we do now?

A pretty picture of a Peruvian hunter from 9000 years ago, bringing down vicuna with her atlatl and spear:

The image is based on the remains of the dead hunter, and an analysis of grave goods.

At Wilamaya Patjxa, an archaeological site in southern Peru, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose people buried her with a hunters’ toolkit, including projectile points. The find prompted University of California Davis archaeologist Randall Haas and his colleagues to take a closer look at other Pleistocene and early Holocene hunters from around the Americas.

Their results may suggest that female hunters weren’t as rare as we thought. And that, in turn, reminds us that gender roles haven’t always been the same in every culture.

“The objects that accompany [people] in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life,” Haas and his colleagues wrote. And when one young woman died 9,000 years ago in what is now southern Peru, her people buried her with at least six stone spear tips of a type used in hunting large prey like deer and vicuña (a relative of the alpaca). The points seem to have been bundled along with a stone knife, sharp stone flakes, scraping tools, and ocher for tanning hides.

I also learned a new genetics fact! The bones were fragmentary, and the bits that you use for a morphological assessment of sex had crumbled to dust. But you can sex a skeleton by looking at the proteins that make up tooth enamel.

Tooth enamel contains proteins called amelogenins, which play a role in forming the enamel in the first place. The genes that produce these proteins are located on the X and Y chromosomes, and each version is slightly different. As a result, people who are genetically female have slightly different amelogenins than people who are genetically male. The proteins in the ancient hunter’s tooth enamel had a distinctly female signature, with no trace of the Y chromosome version.

The hunter from Wilamaya Patjxa is a young woman with the tools of an activity usually associated with men. If the objects people are buried with are the objects they used in life, then that raises some questions.

Maybe she was some weird outlier, I hear you ask. So they surveyed what was found at other grave sites, and it looks like a significant fraction of ancient hunters in the Western hemisphere happened to be women.

The hunter from Wilamaya Patjxa raises a similar question: was she the exception that proved the rule, or does her burial suggest that (in at least some ancient cultures) women were sometimes hunters? To help answer that question, Haas and his colleagues looked for other ancient people who had been buried with hunting tools. In published papers from archaeological sites across the Americas, they found 27 people at 18 different sites: 16 men and 11 women.

…the fact that so many apparent women turned up on that list is surprising. “Female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial,” wrote Haas and his colleagues. They suggest that as many as a third to half of women across the ancient Americas may have been actively involved in hunting.

The final line in this article is perfect.

Based on animal bones at Wilamaya Patjxa, large game like vicuña and taruca (a relative of deer) were extremely important to the community’s survival. In that case, hunting may have been an all-hands-on-deck activity. Haas and his colleagues also suggest that letting other members of a community keep an eye on the kids while the parents hunted might have freed more women up to bring home the bacon—or venison, in this case.

In other words, whether women hunted or fought probably depended on social factors, not biological ones.

I thought I ought to let David Futrelle know about this, since it makes the title of his blog even more ironic, but he beat me to it and has already posted about how She Hunted the Mammoth.

I thought enrollments were supposed to be down?

Yikes. It’s the first day of spring term registration, first thing in the morning, and my genetics class is already full…plus I’m giving a few students permission to take it beyond capacity (I’m splitting all the labs to meet pandemic requirements).

Spring: all the anxiety and overwork of the fall, only with crappier weather. They better cure this pandemic soon, or I may keel over from the stress.

Oh, wait. Pandemics don’t happen anymore.

Well, if a Harvard Professor says so, it must be true.