I thought I struggled with two small children over the weekend, but I just cracked a container in the lab and found one Parasteatoda mama dealing with a few hundred little spiderlings. Everyone was scampering all over the place.
Look! They’re all over the jungle gym! Seemed familiar.
I was just served Pascal’s Wager in my email. Anyone who deploys that ill-formed nonsense is a fool in my book — including Pascal himself, who invented it after a weird Jansenist epiphany. My reply is always the same, after Marcus Aurelius, who seems to have avoided the “revelation” of religion:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
That’s good enough for me.
What happened to Pascal’s brain? He must have read some deeper philosophy than the tripe he wrote.
I’ve long wondered how any woman can bear to stay with the selfish scum of the right. There’s no accounting for taste, and some of those women are probably sleazy themselves, but sometimes we can see lines being crossed and spouses just plain giving up on their terrible men.
Case in point: Angela Paxton is divorcing her slimy partner, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. I’m happy to applaud her imminent independence, but she stuck with him for forty years — what was she thinking?
Some gossip we’ll have to wait on is the rumors that Katie Miller and her rat-faced evil partner, Stephen Miller, are on the outs. She’s rumored to be shifting to Elon Musk, which is the one choice that debatably is not an improvement in her situation.
I know I’m being petty, but I enjoy seeing these people suffer.
We had visitors this weekend! My son Connlann and his wife Ji, escorted our grandson Knut on the long drive from Washington state to Morris, Minnesota — and they’re driving all the way back today. My daughter Skatje also decided to trek from Madison, Wisconsin to our house, bringing our granddaughter Iliana. They’ve already gone back home.
So we had two grandchildren here at the same time and same place. Now we’re totally exhausted, but we’d invite them back any time for as long as they want to stay.
Here’s Skatje and Ji at the park.
Meanwhile, Knut was on the splash pad while Major Connlann stood sentry duty.
Iliana was on the playground equipment.
The one downside of this weekend was the Evil Cat, who was at her worst. She hated having company. Her thing was hiding under the furniture, snarling and hissing, reaching out to take swipes with her claws at anyone passing by. Including me. I got my ankles slashed a couple of times.
I hope they come back to visit some day, but the cat doesn’t.
The magnitude of the approval of immigration surprises me a bit. Almost 80% of Americans think immigration is a good thing? And approval has been about 50% for the last two decades? So how did these Republican assholes get elected? Hatred of immigrants and others was their big campaign issue!
What doesn’t make sense is that the Republicans are terrorizing Los Angeles with paramilitary goon squads; they’re making mass deportations of thousands of people; the worst Supreme Court in American history (that includes the Taney court) is giving carte blanche to Trump; and for some reason, the Democrats are practically supine and largely avoiding capitalizing on this weakness in the electorate.
It’s gotten so bad that one college in California is treating ICE like a plague.
California State University, Los Angeles, is giving professors the option of moving their classes online due to students’ fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Heather Lattimer, university provost and vice president for academic affairs, said in a letter to faculty this week, according to the Los Angeles Times, that she had heard students are “scared to take public transit and fearful of driving to campus.”
Lattimer said faculty have “the option of working remotely for a limited time due to extraordinary circumstances they are facing.”
I remember when we made those same accommodations for COVID. I guess Republicans are just another disease.
My granddaughter, Iliana, went spidering this morning and found this beauty.
She’s a natural!
I’m a fairly skeptical guy. I never bought into those claims that Epstein didn’t kill himself — hey, he was in prison, with deeply dismal prospects, his fall was precipitous from rich guy with his own private island to convicted pedophile in prison, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine he might despair and commit suicide. But then…along comes Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. Pam Bondi says she has Epstein’s client list on her desk, then Bongino and Patel announce that there is no client list. They release security footage from outside Epstein’s cell and guarantee that it is totally unedited and complete, but it turns out that there is notable splice in the middle of it.
It sure looks like something fishy happened, and that high-level authorities are engaged in a cover-up.
I mean, the alternative is that the entire Trump administration is packed with epic fuck-ups who are unqualified and incompetent and who constantly manage to piss on their own shoes. How likely is that?
I caught these two fooling around on the milkweed, naturally.
I also collected 3 Parasteatoda egg sacs nearby, so it’s not just the beetles getting in the mood.
You wouldn’t think so, and it would be really tough to recruit people into the profession, but this game looks like my cup of tea.
(Warning: the trailer is a bit grisly.)
Except…it’s not out yet, and it’s Windows only. Why do people do that when there are perfectly good Linux/Unix operating systems out there?
Oh. It’s an experiment.
Man, I wish we were in the control group.
If you think the cartoon is too extreme, try reading Science magazine.
Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware.
So is U.S. academic science as a whole—perhaps dramatically. Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that if Congress approves the cuts to the agency proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%—from 95,700 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs during this fiscal year to 21,400 in 2026. Young researchers supported by other agencies would also be hit, and even senior faculty worry about their future. “It’s a nightmare,” Simon says. “I really fear for the future of science.” (NSF declined to comment for this story.)
Me, too.
