I brought another spider home, I couldn’t resist

We took a walk last night, and found a place in some cinder block where, suspended in a framework of silk, there were these little collections of grass and twigs glued together. I pulled out this one, which is nicely boat-shaped, and inside were two egg sacs and a shy momma spider. I carried it home in my hand, which was a little tricky — as momma became somewhat alarmed that her house was moving, she would peek out and sometimes scurry around on my hand. Fortunately, I think she was also concerned about her eggs, so she didn’t go far.

This is probably a mistake — I’ve got way too many spiders as it is — but I’ll take her into the lab today and feed her and care for her and raise her little babies as if they were my own.

Hey, here’s a game! I picked this photo because the spider isn’t at all obvious in her nest. Can you find the spider?

As usual, you can find closeups on Instagram and Patreon.

Venus must be the science topic du jour

It’s in all the best webcomics!

I’ll take Paul Lynde for the center square, please. (oops, dated myself.)

Finding phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus is interesting, and it sure sounds like the scientists who found it were all cautious and conservative and thorough, so I believe them that it’s there. I have a couple of caveats about how it’s interpreted, though. Phosphine can be produced abiotically — it’s found in the atmosphere of Jupiter, for instance — but it takes a lot of energy in reactions that weren’t thought to occur on Venus, but that could be the “weird high-heat chemistry” the comic mentions. It’s also produced biotically, on Earth by the decay of organic matter, but here it’s only a small component, and it’s also fairly rapidly broken down by sunlight. So we’re postulating huge quantities of organic matter decaying on Venus to produce phosphines, or an unusual organic process that produces persistent phosphines from a small quantity of biomass? I don’t know. Sounds unlikely and strange, but I love to see unlikely and strange.

No matter what, though, don’t expect Venusian cloud-cities and communicative aliens. Phosphine is a flammable, toxic gas, and at best we’re seeing the excretions of bacteria-like organisms, and even that is not likely.

Surprising spider industry

I have an office spider, Diana, who lives in a display case with a wooden climbing frame and a floor made of left over calcareous sand and shells from my aquarist days. Today I found that she’d seized stuff from the ground, like this:

…lifted them up to her web up high, and build a hemispherical nest, which she was snuggled down inside of. Clever girl.

If you want to see the nest, I put a photo on Patreon (reminder: I have a patreon account I use to try to pay off our legal debt) and also on Instagram.

A mysterious case of data blindness, maybe?

We’re teaching students how to plot data and analyze trends and do statistics in lab this week. Here’s an exercise for you. Does this curve look like it’s flattening? Or declining?

That’s us, the Stevens county frequency of COVID-19 cases. Classes are still ongoing. No changes in our plans. I guess that means the incidence must be stable or getting better?

Muh vaccine!

I really want to see a vaccine appear soon, since it’s our only hope for ending this pandemic in the long run. I’m also realistic and know that it would be really unusual to develop one this quickly. AstraZeneca is testing one, and already the trial is on hold, after bad but unspecified adverse effects appeared in the test population.

This is not surprising, and it’s to be expected that the development will not be smooth and linear. It’s still disappointing.

Next, of course, we don’t even know how effective the vaccine will be. You shouldn’t have been partying yet anyhow.

MORE! MORE SPIDERS! YOU ARE ALL DOOOOMED!

I went off to feed the spiders this morning, and as I was going out the door, Mary asked if I needed any more egg sacs. “I hope not,” I replied, because I’ve got so many baby spiders to tend that I’m not sure what I would do if I had another round of hatchlings. So she cursed me. I found 7 nice new Parasteatoda egg sacs, and 2 new Steatoda triangulosa sacs. I tell you, I’m getting so good at breeding spiders I am currently oscillating between two states.

The only thing that will save me is that I expect, from past experience, that about half the egg sacs will contain only infertile eggs. It’s not my fault, the females are picky, and some of them constantly friendzone* all their suitors. Three of them are definitely from non-virginal, proven breeders, though, so I’m anticipating dealing with about 300 more babies soon.

By the way, I like to regularly remind you all that I have a Patreon, and if you want to see a photo of a hungry baby at the table, sign up!

*“friendzone”, in the native Spider, is synonymous with “murder and eat”. I suspect MRAs/Incels of being native Spider speakers, which has led to all kinds of confusion and erroneous ideas about the human version of the word.

I know I rag on physicists sometimes, but you’ve got to stop making it so easy

God damn it.

This is true, mostly. It’s the University of Illinois, and it was a physicist and a bioengineering professor (who had also done some ecological modeling) who came up with the model.

Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and bioengineering Professor Sergei Maslov, who developed models of the disease for the state and campus, said they think cases can be kept to a level that can be traced and won’t overwhelm the hospital system.

They also used a grossly simplified model of human interactions, which they claim was a “worst-case scenario”. It wasn’t.

“We did not model the friendship social networks of the students when they go outside and socialize in bars and restaurants,” he said. “So our calculation is, in fact, a worst-case scenario, because we assume more mixing outside of the university.”

Here’s an absolutely classic physicist comment from back in March.

For them, transitioning to epidemiology was easy. “The equations that describe epidemics are simplified versions of ones that describe ecology,” says Goldenfeld. For the COVID-19 model, they chose equations that echoed models of predator and prey.

So…epidemiology is easy, they just had to strip out a lot of complicating factors, and then adapt a general ecology model that isn’t actually appropriate here. In other words, they imagined a spherical frictionless undergraduate, made a model that they liked, and then — JESUS FUCKING CHRIST — got the ear of the governor of Illinois and set the policy for whole state.

And now…

Parties, gatherings and “irresponsible and dangerous” behavior has led to a spike of nearly 800 coronavirus cases on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, school officials said, and the university is cracking down.

On Wednesday, the university announced 780 new coronavirus cases on the campus, the Chicago Tribune reported. The campus is now implementing mandatory testing twice a week for all students.

You know, you could have listened to epidemiologists, who actually have some specific expertise in this sort of thing.