Bring me the head of Arthropleura

We’ve known about these amazing fossils from the lower Carboniferous for a while — it’s Arthropleura, a gigantic 2.5 meter long millipede. Imagine cleaning up your kitchen when a beast 2 or 3 times your length fluidly, sinuously crawls out from your baseboards. Wouldn’t that be neat?

One of the only problems with imagining that is that none of the fossils to date have had a head. Sure, it’s imposingly large, but what kind of face does it have? It’s a millipede, and millipedes are harmless detritivores who aren’t going to be a threat at all, unless you’re a pile of moldering leaves or a fungus. It’s centipedes that are primarily carnivores, with pointy sharp venomous forcipules that can deliver a nasty bite. That Arthropleura is in the millipede clade tends to blunt their potential menace.

Good news, time-traveling super-villains looking for a pet! The head of Arthropleura has at last been discovered, and it’s centipede-like, with strong bitey jaws, and also has stalked eyes. It’s a bit squished.

(A and B) Three-dimensional reconstruction. (A) Dorsal view. (B) Ventral view. (C and D) specimen inside the nodule. (C) Part. (D) Counterpart. Co, collum; DT, digestive tube; H, head; Pt, paratergite; S#, sternite number; St, syntergite; T#, tergite number; Te, telson. Reconstructions are made from Phoenix X-ray Phoenix V|tome|x CT scan. Scale bars, 1 cm (C and D) and 5 mm (A and B).

(A) Dorsal view. (B) Ventral view. (C) Back view. (D) Frontal view. Left maxillae were removed on (B) to better illustrate the mandible below. The red circle on (C) indicates the position of the digestive tract.

However, it’s still thought likely that it was a detritivorous. This has advantages for those of us who really want one as a pet: it’s still an intimidating creature, but in its free time it can roam the lair, cleaning up any untidiness.

Yes, I might fantasize a bit about keeping a few Arthropleura about the house. Better than a dog, anyhow.

I had The Talk with my chair

I turned in my application for a sabbatical next year. It’ll almost certainly be approved. Yay!

While I was there, I also discussed my future plans. I’m going to start phased retirement the year after that, 2026, and teach a 75% load that year. I’ll be negotiating with my colleagues about the years after that, but I’m thinking I’ll probably be outta here in 4 years.

I just hit my breaking point and decided to commit to an exit strategy. All of my classes are so inert — too many quiet faces staring expressionlessly at me every day. The students are fine, I just think I’m getting too old and losing that spark to trigger good engagement. They deserve better.

More good news: maybe there will be a job opening for a new biologist in a few years…if the administration eventually approves a replacement.

This is why the Republicans want to ban NOAA

The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote: For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.

He added, Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.

Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.

During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?

The big hat must cover a big brain.

Hey, Florida, you still there?

Don’t bother to answer, just get out while you can, if you haven’t already. Milton is supposed to make landfall soon.

As someone in Minnesota, I don’t understand why anyone lives in that morass of swampland. Sure, we get occasional tornadoes, but they’re pitiful compared to hurricanes; yeah, it gets a bit cold in the winter, but we just hunker down in a cozy warm house until the blizzard blows over, and we’re not sitting in a puddle of sweat all the time. There’s also the difference between a governor Walz vs DeSantis.

Follow the Mississippi north. We’ll welcome you with some hotdish and a pair of mittens.

What’s the best and worst state?

I’d have to agree with the extremes of this entirely subjective and data free map.

I have to disagree with some of the middlin’ state rankings, though. North Dakota is a terrible place, I think it got a higher ranking just for Fargo, which really belongs in Minnesota. I’d rank Wisconsin above Iowa. Texas is ranked way too high.

Yeah, Mississippi is kind of the leaking colon of the country.

Is my conference from hell finally over?

About a year and a half ago, I had an absolutely miserable experience. A student and I were going to the American Arachnology Society conference at Cornell University; we paid up the conference fees, made a lovely poster, booked our flights, and traipsed down to the Minneapolis airport…where we sat for two days, watching our flight get delayed and delayed, and eventually, finally, they gave up and told us that our flights were cancelled, we should go home.

That was terrible enough.

All this was paid through university travel funds, and I did all the responsible stuff of getting our registration fees reimbursed (I thought), and while we were miserable and disappointed, we were done. Except…my nightmare had only just begun.

You see, all travel expenses at my university go through some accounting software called Chrome River. We didn’t go? We spent less than we’d told it we were going to? Some of the planned expenses were bouncing back with reimbursements? Total shit fit. I’ve been dealing with its conniptions ever since, getting cryptic demands and threats by email.

What totally threw the software was a) Cornell said we were getting reimbursed, but we didn’t, and I only just got a check for the registration fees this week, and b) the rotten airline did not reimburse us at all, but instead billed the university for $60 for flight cancellation. That’s right, they cancelled the flights, but we got charged extra for the inconvenience.

Chrome River has been dunning me, personally, for the money for the past year. If I didn’t cough up something in the next few days, I was going to be held responsible for spending less money than we had planned, and was going to have to pay up or else. All year long, I’ve been getting these horribly opaque machine-generated emails from some evil accounting software.

Well, I think I’ve finally jumped through all the flaming hoops they’ve demanded of me, getting all the ridiculous paperwork filled out and filed today. I’m done.

Except…I’m told that tomorrow I have to log on to Chrome River and press three buttons to finalize everything. I’m terrified. I’ve seen how Chrome River reacts to tiny deviations from its required protocol. What if I press the wrong button, or press them in the wrong order, or fail to show the proper respect while following its demands? This hell might go on even longer.

I think I might have to retire sooner than expected just to avoid dealing with Chrome River ever again.

Act now! Everything must go!

Do you want any of this crap? InfoWars is being liquidated, you’ve got to get your bid in by 8 November.

There’s probably some worthwhile electronics in that batch, but I’m not at all interested in picking up their domain names or media rights or backlog of bad videos. I’m just happy to see that morass of lies and misinformation being dissolved.

Do Facebook and Twitter next.

I was once a tech for some fancy computer gear, a VAX 11/750. It got way too expensive to maintain, but we couldn’t get rid of it — no one wanted it, and it had a university ID tag on it. So we stored it in an old quonset hut that was scheduled for demolition, and whoops, where did it go? There’s a solution for the InfoWars set.

Except that they need to get money for it, to repay all the victims of Jones’ lying depradations.

Another fun computer game you can play!

If you don’t care about birds flitting about, here’s another tool, TimeTree. It’ll let you look up the divergence time between any two species, in this case I just chose to compare myself with my house spiders.

700 million years sounds about right, but that’s just the general time since the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates. Our shared ancestor would have been some nondescript little worm.

If you’re arguing with Kent Hovind, it might be useful to know that the last common ancestor of humans and bananas lived about 1.5 billion years ago; same time since we diverged from the amoeba. The paleo-proterozoic was a busy time! Or, at least the seas were full of eukaryotes then.

What do you think this is, Spring?

I came home this afternoon to find swarms of dispersing spiderlings — the trees and shrubs were dotted with these tiny little guys on skeins of silk trying to spread out and find new homes.


It’s October, you dopes. It’s getting cold (although this week we’re having a surge of warmer weather), it’ll snow sometime in the near future, unless you’re looking for a safe place to hunker down and overwinter, this doesn’t seem like a smart strategy to me.