The virtues of vengeance

We had a little fracas in our front yard yesterday. My wife has several bird feeders out there, and a tree branch is draped with disgusting lumps of suet which have attracted multiple species and individuals of woodpecker — there are a couple of big pileated woodpeckers that hang out around here regularly now. Unsurprisingly, this concentration of happy birds attracted an unwelcome visitor.

There was a lot of squawking and frantic fluttering and panic-stricken birds flying away from our house.

That got me thinking. The woodpeckers are rather helpless, with the choice of eating or being eaten. If I were in that position of a predator blocking my access to food and threatening to kill and eat me, I’d be pissed off and talking to the neighbors about what to do about it. Maybe we’d contact local communities and trade goods and services to recruit samurai — you know, like maybe 7 of them — to hunt down and kill the predator that I’m personally helpless against, so that I can resume gnawing frozen fat off a tree branch.

Woodpeckers don’t have that capability, but humans do. It seems to me that this attribute of revenge and organized overkill might have been a major advantage in our evolution. Other animals certainly make the effort to eliminate competition, but we’re really good at building cooperative specialists to mob anyone who interferes with our living, or annoys us a little bit, or makes a rude comment on Twitter.

We may have overdone it, but our local woodpeckers would probably appreciate being able to find an ally to chase off the bad guy.

Actually, they do have Mary, who’ll go out and wave her arms and yell at the offending bird, but she’s going to go away for a few weeks. I’ll still be here for most of that time, but I’ll probably just watch the drama and muse about the evolutionary pressures imposed by predation.

Clean up the corpses of your victims before they begin to stink

That’s an important lesson I learned from my spiders. I’m going out of town for a week, so over the weekend I made sure that everyone was well fed and watered, stuffing them full of waxworms. Which meant that today I had to go in and extract all the blackened, shriveled corpses of their prey so they wouldn’t just be sitting there rotting for days and days. A pile of dead flies or larvae do acquire a distinctive aroma, so I wanted everyone left with clean cages before I abandoned them.

Also, wow, were these all plump, sleek, shiny spiders. They’ll do fine without me for a few days now.

Teaching cooking, teaching science…lessons to learn

Classes start up again in a few weeks, but I thought I’d take some time to get inspired by a master teacher, watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

That’s sarcasm, by the way. I think Ramsay has real talent as a skilled chef who knows what he’s doing, but he’s a terrible teacher. His show is an excuse to put him in situations with low-talent chefs, where he can explode entertainingly and then reshape the restaurant with his genuine expertise…but really, the entertainment value comes from the raging meltdowns. The effective teaching moments come from the occasional moments of empathy where he explains with real sincerity to the bad cooks what they must do to get back on track. It’s actually a series of demonstrations of how not to teach, interspersed with rare moments when a little light shines through and you see what really works.

It reminded me of science in a lot of ways. We have the same problems. Ramsay sometimes fondly recollects his training, when he had to work 7 days a week for long hours and got yelled at by demanding masters; I knew labs like that, but was fortunate to have had mentors who were much more understanding and treated their students like human beings. After seeing him in action a few times, I just want to tell Ramsay that he was abused by people seeking to build their reputations and their income, and that he is now perpetuating that abuse, while pretending that it is necessary to be abused to become a great chef. It shouldn’t be. It’s obvious that being a line cook is intense, hard work that requires discipline and focus, but screaming and throwing food at the wall and calling the cook making the mistake a donut doesn’t help. It’s counterproductive, even if it does make for flashy reality TV.

Both science and cooking excel when the people doing it love their work, have a passion for their subject, and are creative. They both also require discipline and focus. Glorifying grueling expectations and taskmasters who torment their lackeys is a poor way to instill discipline, and is antithetical to that passionate embrace of the work.

Yet after watching him work for a while, I still kind of like Gordon Ramsay, but only for those moments where he lets the mask slip and reveals that he likes at least some of the people he’s yelling at, and has these brief moments of heart-to-heart communication. That’s where the real teaching gets done.

Bathroom buddy

Look who was keeping warm in a corner of our bathroom:

I’d really like to know where they hide most of the time. All winter long we see these isolated individuals suddenly popping up out of nowhere.

Found another one hanging out in the dining room with a mess of fibers. It’s very tiny, half the size of the one above.

Spiders had their breakfast

This morning, I cruised down to the local bait shop and bought a bunch of waxworms. “Good luck fishing,” said the proprietor, as I was going out the door. I didn’t feel like explaining that there would be no fish involved today.

I got to the lab and delicately tweezered one pale white waxworm into the center of each cobweb, where it would squirm unhappily. It had been lifted out of its comfortable environment and was hanging suspended from a couple of cables, which it did not like at all. Picture a whale trussed up and dangling from the ceiling of a meatlocker, straining to escape the trap, while little fanged predators look on.

The spiders usually paused for a few minutes. I imagine they were briefly stunned at the immensity of the bounty that has fallen from the skies, but they didn’t wait long — they swiftly scuttled out, their hindlimbs flickering as they quickly reinforced the webbing, occasionally moving in close for a long kiss.

When I left, I looked in the incubator…rank after rank of transparent cages, like little glass abbatoirs, each with a madly writhing worm struggling desperately to escape, each with a small long-legged creature clinging to their back, biting.

Warmed my heart, it did. They looked so happy and eager (the spiders, not the worms). It reminded me of my kids on Christmas morning.

Australia has spiders? Shocking!

I’ve had so many people tell me about this new spider, Dolomedes briangreenei, and the news makes it sound like a surprise that it can dive under water and eat small aquatic vertebrates.

Spiders have been known to do all kinds of amazing things, and there’s nothing surprising about any of that. We have several species of Dolomedes right here in Minnesota, and they’re semi-aquatic and kill and eat tadpoles and small fish all the time. The Australian Academy of Science has announced the discovery of 51 new species of spiders just this past year! I’m relatively new to this taxonomy stuff, and one thing I know is that finding new species is routine, as is discovering that species have gone extinct.

Bioethics has teeth

I told you that He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who had been carrying out gene editing on human subjects, was doing bad science and violating lots of ethical restrictions. I was right, obviously, because he was immediately repudiated and arrested by the Chinese government. You might be wondering what happens if you break the rules of bioethics — isn’t it all just an agreement between peers not to meddle in experiments that might cause trouble for each other? Well, now we know: He Jiankui has been tried and sentenced. He’s being fined over $400,000, and is going to prison for three years. Two of his colleagues are also going to jail. They’re also going to get a lifelong ban on doing scientific research with human subjects.

This isn’t just Chinese totalitarianism at work, either. It’s the same in most places.

Robin Lovell-Badge at the Francis Crick Institute in London told the UK Science Media Centre that a prison sentence and fine would also have been the likely penalties if someone had conducted similar work in the UK.

Maybe not everywhere, though. The people who carried out the Tuskegee syphilis study were not punished; the doctors who were paid to tell the public that smoking was safe were not punished; Andrew Wakefield is still roaming free, and is even making movies to spread disinformation; you can lie all you want about climate change. Jiankui seems to have picked the wrong victims, or lacked the corporate backing, to make his violations of human rights ignorable.

P.S. I think a hefty fine and a few years in prison would be the minimal punishment for Wakefield, who is responsible for the deaths of who knows how many children.

Or he could switch to arguing that those birds are immigrants, anyway

I’ve always wondered about this — I live in wind turbine country, my university runs a couple of them, and I’ve been out to walk around them, and there’s always something missing. There aren’t heaps of dead birds under them, like Donald Trump claims there are! I wondered if the blades strike these birds and flick their lump dead corpses off into the distance, or if there are thriving swarms of scavengers lurking in the bushes that snatch up the meat bounty falling from the heavens. It turns out I was wrong. wind turbines kill some birds, inevitably, but the real danger is…your cats.

I find it hard to believe MY PRESIDENT lied to me.

I assume that he will adapt to the facts and change his message at campaign rallies to something about how we need to deport or kill all those cats. He could probably put some kittens in a sack and slam it against a wall a few times, and then fling it into a river — his fans will all cheer.

Beauty contest!

We encountered a few indoor spiders today, so I thought I’d stage a little beauty contest.

Contestant #1: Pholcus phalangioides, found wandering the laboratories of the University of Minnesota. Hobbies: must be biology, since she was captured working in a biology lab.

Contestant #2: Sitticus fasciger, found hopping around in my house. Hobbies: jumping, obviously.

You are the judges! Who wins your approval?