Chores done!

I got a lot of the menial tedious stuff done today.

✔ New fly stocks set up! This is something I have to do every week to maintain the flow of fly bodies to my hungry spiders.

✔ Backlog of old fly bottles scrubbed and in the autoclave! My least favorite chore. It’s disgusting, my sink fills up with dead flies and huge quantities of pupal shells.

✔ My dirty glassware bucket is completely empty! Huzzah!

✔ I scrubbed up 7 old spider cages, all spider poop and cobwebs fly husks removed with soap and water, and a follow-up wipe-down with alcohol. Now drying overnight.

✔ The big job: repairing and cleaning up the wooden frames the spiders live on. These are just made with 1/4″ dowels and bamboo strips, held together with hot glue (everything in my lab is held together with either or both hot glue and duct tape). Early in this semester, I think I overcompensated with maintaining humidity, and mold grew freely, and the wood warped, popping some of the hot glue joints. Now fixed! Everything was scrubbed down with water and an alcohol wipe.

✔ Washed up a bunch of spider vials.

✔ Ick, scrubbed out the lab sink, which was covered with a thick layer of soggy scraps of chitin. Bonus: while tidying up part of the lab, I found my long lost devil ducky! Maybe future sink scrubbings will be a little happier.

I didn’t transfer spiders to new cages yet–I decided to let the cages and frames dry overnight. No one wants to move into a damp house, after all.

So tomorrow:

  • Remove fly bottles from autoclave & put them away.
  • Move 7 adult spiders from their old filthy cages, move to fresh shiny cages.
  • Scrub old filthy cages, so I can give another 7 spiders a nice clean cage the next day.

Later this week, after they’ve all had a chance to build brand new cobwebs, everyone gets fed. Once everyone is in new homes, it’ll be time for a major lab cleanup — I have old fish tank stuff that just has to go bye-bye.

Time to make my getaway

I have a plan, a good plan, for today. I’m escaping to my lab for a good chunk of the day to do mindless, mundane stuff. It’ll be fun.

Let’s see…first on my list is to make more flies. Then I’m going to scrub out a backlog of fly bottles and get them into the autoclave. Then I have to start rotating spider cages — I have to wash a half dozen cages and do some repair of frames, move a half dozen spiders from old stinky poopy cages to the new shiny clean ones, so I can wash those cages tomorrow and shuffle around some more spiders. I’ll also do some general tidying up before feeding all the baby spiders and coming home.

So there you have it, the glamorous scientific life. At least it’s all stuff one can do during a pandemic.

Spiders, like me, are just hard to love

This article on spider researcher Maydianne Andrade struck a nerve.

Spiders are not exactly a charismatic animal in many people’s minds. Do you feel like you have a different experience than someone who works on tigers or cute birds like chickadees?

I have to spend quite a lot of time convincing people that studying spiders is actually important. They are one of the dominant invertebrate terrestrial predators, which means that they take down a lot of insects. And so understanding how they work in their environment is actually important for us, understanding how to maintain the health of those environments.

If you look at the distribution of the diversity of organisms in nature, insects and spiders make up a huge proportion of that diversity. And yet they make up only a tiny proportion of what type of work we’re publishing on, and so it really is the animals with the big eyelashes and the big eyes, you know, the cute mammals and the beautiful sounding birds that the people are studying disproportionately.

Oh yeah, and those bird scientists are just the worst.

She’s commenting on the fact that I added two whole minutes of bird footage shot from my office window to my last video because it’s really hard to find wild spiders in a Minnesota December. Just for that I’m going to have to record some of my lab spiders for the end of my next video, even though I know it’ll trigger squeals of protest, and my subscriber count will probably go down.

You know, some spiders do have big eyes and eyelashes, he says, defensively.

[Read more…]

The return of the probability argument

We should have known. We’ve heard it for so long. Creationists love the Argument from Big Numbers — if we chain together a whole series of improbabilities and multiply them, we can get a really big exponent, therefore God. This approach is so familiar there’s a FAQ by Ian Musgrave on the errors in the calculations of the evolution of proteins.

Problems with the creationists’ “it’s so improbable” calculations

1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a “modern” protein, or even a complete bacterium with all “modern” proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.

2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.

3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.

4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.

5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

We’ve seen it all. People seem to be fundamentally statistically innumerate and, without training, incapable of grasping the basic principles. There are whole books about innumeracy and its consequences.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw that the Texas Attorney General had filed a lawsuit claiming there was a less than one in a quadrillion chance that Biden could have honestly won the Texas election, and that it’s based on a familiarly stupid argument. Also unsurprising: that an old talk.origins compatriot, Wesley Elsberry, would jump on the faulty reasoning. We’ve all been here before.

Texas filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four other states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia). Others have already weighed in on how unserious a lawsuit this apparently is.

But I want to have a look at something that is a bit more approachable, which is the statistics opinion that Texas Attroney General Ken Paxton relied upon in crafting the lawsuit. It makes some remarkable claims:

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the
four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—
independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.
on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four
States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one
in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004). See Decl.
of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. (“Cicchetti Decl.”) at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31 (App. 4a-7a,
9a).

Read Wesley’s post for a thorough deconstruction (or this thread for a similar take), so I’ll keep it simple. What kills Paxton’s claims are the assumptions: he assumes that voters should have voted exactly as they did in 2016, that people who voted early on election day would have the same statistical preferences as those who voted later, that people who voted in person would vote the same way as those who voted by mail, and that different precincts would show no change in their preferences over time. He doesn’t seem to realize that what he has shown is not that Biden couldn’t have won, but that his assumptions were all wrong.

Now this has gotten me thinking about genetics, and it’s too early — this is my break, people — and the very first cross we’re going to do. It’s a boring cross to get heterozygotes out of two true-breeding strains, just a preliminary to the real experiment, but I have the students do observations to test their assumption that they’ll get half males and half females. They never do, and the statistics all say it’s a significant difference, with more females than males. Further, when you sample the population at different times after eclosion, it changes, with more females eclosing early. You don’t get to say, “it’s supposed to be 50:50!” and pretend your results are wrong — you’re supposed to question your assumption that sex is a random binary choice. There are a lot of factors that bias the outcome!

Alien Worlds

Netflix has this new series, Alien Worlds, that I sort of half-watched yesterday. It was nice brain candy to munch on while I was more focused on grading, but nah, sorry, not a lot of substance to it.

It’s only 5 episodes long, and each one is built around a different imaginary planet with somewhat different parameters, with different challenges for the life that evolved there. Within each episode, there’s a fraction that uses CGI to model the imaginary creatures of the imaginary world — and the CGI isn’t bad, we’ve come a long way from the clumsy models of old Discovery Channel “Walking with…” shows — and there’s a larger fraction dedicated to describing the earthly research that inspired it.

The problem is that the real world stuff, with interviews with real scientists, was far more compelling than the CGI gimmicks. The “Janus” episode, for instance, is supposed to be about a tidally-locked planet with huge extremes in the environment, but it’s really much more about terrestrial arthropods, with researchers explaining their work in interesting environments with complex organisms. Their imaginary pentapods were sterile and cartoonish — it was a world with a nearly negligible amount of species diversity, just their one cartoon alien scampering about, plucking out 1-dimensional prey creatures on rather barren landscapes. Every time they were on screen, I was grumbling “Get back to the leaf-cutter ants”.

That’s how I felt about every episode. The central gimmick of imaginative CGI aliens was less impressive than the real biology being done on Planet Earth, and was just a distraction. Human imagination is just not as good as evolutionary reality.

One big plus about the show: they were working with actual researchers in various places around the world, and that meant they escaped from the usual trap of one narrator (usually a white person who isn’t involved in the science) providing third person descriptions of what’s happening. Instead, we get lots of diverse people, women and brown people with accents, describing in first person what they find exciting about their work. The researchers have a lot of enthusiasm and joy about the biology.

One big negative: skip the last episode, it’s terrible. I knew it was going to suck when they opened with the “alien autopsy” footage. They then move on to an imaginary planet populated with brains in vats faced with the death of their star…and they lack any earthly analog, so instead of cutting back and forth between CGI and enthusiastic scientists doing real research, it’s switching between animated robots tending blobs floating in tanks (boring!) to human SETI researchers (even more boring!).

I’m not looking forward to a continuation of the series. It’s nice background noise, but if I were to make any recommendations to the producers, it would be to ditch the whole CGI/aliens nonsense, but that’s probably the premise that got them a Netflix deal.

Syracuse, you still there?

Of course you are, but maybe you didn’t notice the meteor that tried to kill you. I have to say, though, that the news report is full of admirable scientific detail.

This meteor was so bright that it was captured by a NASA satellite that monitors lightning. The bits of debris scattered after the meteor exploded could likely be seen on National Weather Service radar. And the sonic boom was detected in Ontario by a seismograph, the instrument that records earthquakes.

When the meteor finally got hot enough to explode, Cooke said, it released as much energy as 66 tons of dynamite.

“When it broke apart it produced a shock wave that produced the sonic boom that people heard,” he said.

The meteor was just under 3 feet across and weighed about 1,800 pounds, NASA estimated. That’s hefty as meteors go: The shooting stars seen in annual meteor showers are not bigger than small pebbles or golf balls.

Wednesday’s meteor crashed into the atmosphere at 56,000 mph.

“That’s slow for a meteor, actually,” Cooke said. “Some, like the Leonids, move at 150,000 mph.”

The relatively sluggish speed indicates that the meteor probably broke loose from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, about 92 million miles from Earth. That’s as far from Earth as the sun is.

As the meteor pushed through Earth’s increasingly thickening atmosphere, it reached an estimated temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For comparison, the surface of the sun is a little less than 10,000 degrees.

Cooke said the rock – technically called a meteoroid before it hits the Earth’s atmosphere and becomes a meteor — was the color of pencil lead. As it burst into a fireball, it emitted light 100 times brighter than a full moon.

So, Syracuse, how’s it feel to have not been destroyed by an 1800 pound rock traveling at 56,000 mph, exploding with the force of 66 tons of dynamite, that has been traveling for millions of years to get you? You should feel special.