Happy #Arachtober! Or is it?

That’s right, #Arachtober is a thing with swarms of people posting photos of their fave spiders this month. It doesn’t seem quite right to me, because October is a sad month for spiders in Minnesota — I’m seeing them fading away as the weather cools and their prey declines and we approach the terrible frost and frigid winter. Here’s Jenny By-The-Front-Door, for instance.

I’ve been checking on her every day. She’s not very active; she’s huddled in her nest cobbled out of dead leaves and debris, and I can see her legs peeking out, and if I poke at the nest with my finger, she’ll slowly wave at me, but she’s nowhere near as busy as the spiders are in the warm summer months. I expect that one of these days I’ll give her a little poke and she won’t respond. She’ll either be in diapause or dead.

I still have lots of thriving spiders in the climate controlled environment of my lab, at least!

Big Spunk makes babies!

Yesterday, as we were traveling, we made a stop at a rest area to look for spiders, as one does. It was a terrible day for spider-kind, with intermittent rain and constant mist and cold, so it was mostly a fruitless search. I did find one sad, bedraggled looking Parasteatoda clinging to the underside of a handrail, with a fat drop of water beading up on her tattered web, and she fled as soon as my camera lens nudged in her direction. Just to make her day even worse, I then scooped up a couple of egg sacs she had in her nest, stealing her babies to bring back to the lab.

This morning as I grabbed the vial of sacs from the Big Spunk rest area to bring in to work, I noticed that they had hatched out! Baby spiderlings everywhere! They were probably triggered by being brought in to a nice warm house.

If someone is passing by Big Spunk today, could you stop in and tell their mama that her babies have found a good home, and we’ll take care of them? Probably more of these will survive here than they would in a drizzly empty wilderness where even the mosquitos weren’t flying.

I’ll be babbling in St Paul today

At 1:00, I’ll be at the Rondo Community Library (461 Dale St N, St Paul, MN 55104) to talk about how humans will never be immortal, explaining some recent technological follies that demonstrate that no matter how bad the work, someone will pay for it. Would you believe that some “futurists” are claiming that the first person that will live to be 1,000 years-old has already been born? I’m not seeing that kind of progress.

If your idea of a fun time is watching a cynical atheist puncture balloons, come on by.

Thunberg Derangement Syndrome

How sad to see my fellow old white men melting down over Greta Thunberg. They seem to be offended about the fact that she is chastising us for inaction, and worse, contributing to the ongoing problem. Learn to take criticism better, people!

Every day I seem to discover yet another old guy exposing the rot in their brain. The latest victim: Dan Simmons. That’s disappointing, since I read his book, The Terror, and enjoyed it, and heard that he’d written other good books that were on my list of future explorations. But now, no, I’ve scratched him off the list, I won’t bother — there are so many good authors and good books out there that I don’t need to patronize some weird ranty science denialist.

Not only is he petty and sneering at a young girl, he’s a climate change denialist. I looked at some of the other stuff he’s put online, and he’s also a bit of a gun nut and political reactionary, but it’s the scoffing at the science that kills his reputation for me. You know, if you’re going to spit on someone whose message on the climate is “listen to the scientists”, I’m not going to listen to you.

Greta Thunberg certainly has been an excellent crank detector.

Spider pigmentation is engrossing

I’ve been wrestlin’ spiderlings all day, although they’re getting big enough that they’re showing sexual characteristics, like enlarged palps in the males, so maybe they’re more like spider-teens. They’re about three weeks old — I showed you the newly emerged S. triangulosa a while back. I’m currently raising three species (maybe four) of Theridiidae, P. tepidariorum, S. triangulosa, and S. borealis, and I’m seeing that some of the patterns emerge fairly early and in predictable ways.

This is P. tepidariorum, the most common of these spiders, and the one I’m raising for experimental studies in the lab. Some of its obvious characteristics are the mottled abdomen — although it’s still specifically patterned, as you might see from the clear left/right symmetry — and the dark banding around the limb joints. Less obviously from the photo, one other feature is that they build 3-dimensional webs that take full advantage of the space they’re in. When I open up the container, they’re hanging suspended in the middle of the space.
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Make friends with #spiders today!

Yes! This video speaks the truth!

Today is my free day, and I’m looking forward to just hanging out in the lab with the spiders all day long today. I’ve got some tedium to take care of — bottle-washing — but I also have my S. triangulosa babies to examine for changing pigment patterns, and a lot of P. tepidariorum babies I have to upgrade to new containers, and a lot of egg sacs to harvest, and, sadly, a few adults who have died that I’ll clean out and replace with new stock. A busy day of spidering ahead!

Also, one faculty meeting and probably a few students with questions stopping by, so it’s not all spiders.

Have you noticed who is leading us on the environment? And who is opposing action?

These are the true stories we tell our children.

Are you surprised, then, that it’s the kids who are rising up and fighting back? I’m not. I’m impressed that so many young people, especially young girls, are the heroes leading the way.

Far more depressing, and predictable, is that there are older men who are harassing and threatening the activists. My generation, my gender. My population seems to have been enriched in ignorant assholes.

In a sign that the threats, online and in person, are ramping up against the activists, Jamie mentioned how Zero Hour had a problem with a stalker that resulted in the group hiring armed security for a youth training summit in Miami in July.

The main threat, Mebane clarified, was made against a celebrity supporter, but there was concern about the danger extending to the young activists. “That was the first time a serious threat was made,” Mebane said.

In another case of escalating safety concerns, Haven, who has been striking on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol building in Denver, has had recent intimidating encounters. One man passed by her going up the stairs only to come back down, go up to her, and tell her that her striking was “stupid.” Another man wearing a MAGA hat kept taking pictures of her from across the street. Haven’s mom had been chaperoning on her strikes, but after the recent incidents, her dad will start accompanying her too.

I appreciate it when they self-advertise with the MAGA hats, but I’d be even more appreciative if they’d crawl away in shame at what they’ve become.

How do you feed a baby without rubber nipples?

These odd little pots tell a story about a revolution in human biology that occurred over 5000 years ago.

They turn out to have been milk bottles for feeding infants. That’s a reasonable inference about function from shape, but now also it’s been determined by isolating lipids still adhering to the inner surface, showing that they contained goat or cow milk. These came from cultures that had domesticated milk-giving animals, and they were using them to supplement feeding their children. Probably the adults as well, since this would have been a time when lactose tolerance was evolving.

Another effect of this change in diet: the pots were extracted from children’s graves. With new nutritional sources came exposure to new pathogens. There is evidence that these pots were heated, cooking some of the lipids into the ceramic, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t also some accidental pasteurization going on…although it’s also likely they would have just squirted fresh warm milk straight from the teat into these pots.

Counterpoint.

(No, she isn’t living on a diet of Dr Pepper, she’s just playing with an empty can under parental supervision.)

Neuralink is 99% hype

A couple of years ago, Elon Musk bought a company called Neuralink, which is trying to build a bigger, better brain-machine interface. The hype was incredible. Here’s a small sample (note: the author confuses a concept called a “neural lace” from Ian Banks’ science fiction novels with Musk’s Neuralink over and over again, which tells you how unreal every thing is):

As an immediate application, Neural Lace could potentially help patients suffering from brain injuries and certain illnesses. However, the utimate goal and mission of Neuralink are to successfully merge the human brain with machine, fusing human intelligence with Artificial Intelligence. As a result, this is expected to bring humanity up to a higher level of cognitive reasoning.

At some point, Neural Lace is going to enable humans to upload and download information directly from a computer. Just in a similar way how Neo from the Matrix does in order to learn new skills and acquire new information.

In order to insert Neural Lace, a tiny needle containing the rolled up mesh is placed inside the skull. The mesh is then injected and unveiled upon injection, encompassing the brain.

The Neural Lace integrates itself with the human brain. It creates a perfect symbiosis between human and machine. This technology could be the catalyst for the technological Singularity.

Nope. None of that is true. It serves Musk’s interest to have these absurd claims floated about. I wrote about this nonsense at the time. I pointed out the reality then: “Elon Musk has bought a company, and is cunningly trying to inflate its value by drowning the curious in glurge, techno-mysticism, and making shit up, which, because he has this mystique among young male engineers, will probably succeed in making him more money and fame.” That’s what it’s really about, not science, not cool biomedical engineering, not even impractical wish-fulfillment. It’s a game for Elon Musk to pump up his ego and pretend to be cutting-edge in yet another thing, while skimming off lots of money.

Also, he’s got this bizarre paranoia about artificial intelligence, which he doesn’t understand either, and he thinks this is a way to combat the existential risk of the robots taking over.

Anyway, I bring this up again not because Musk has done anything useful with his hype machine, but because a pretty good video came out explaining the details.

She also makes the very good point that this is not gadgetry to benefit the masses, but to make the rich richer and widen the divide between the haves and have-nots, if it worked. Which it doesn’t.

She’s mad, really mad

Why aren’t you?

She seems to be the only one making an honest response to our situation.