Imagine finding a 10 foot long sausage

And deciding to try starting at one end and eating the whole thing. This is the bold jumper, Phidippus audax, that I’m raising in the lab (I’ve got 6 different species of spider thriving there), and I gave her a large mealworm which did not intimidate her in the least — she’s bold, remember. This is a pattern with her. She starts eating a big mealworm, and gets full halfway through, and I’ll have to clean up half-eaten corpses in a couple of day.

(I know, not a great photo, but it was shot through some dirty plexiglas so that’s as clean as I could get it.)

Don’t try to tell me this isn’t cosmic horror

Rabbits in Colorado are being found with these horrifying growths on their bodies.

The scientists have an explanation: the rabbits are infected with a papilloma virus.

The cottontails recently spotted in Fort Collins are infected with the mostly harmless Shope papillomavirus, which causes wart-like growths that protrude from their faces like metastasizing horns.

Viral photos have inspired a fluffle of unflattering nicknames, including “Frankenstein bunnies,” “demon rabbits” and “zombie rabbits.” But their affliction is nothing new, with the virus inspiring ancient folklore and fueling scientific research nearly 100 years ago.

Yeah, right. It’s a coverup. The truth is that the rabbits were nosing around in a blasted heath, and…

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule imbedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.

Run away!

Laws be damned

I am relieved that I am not a gay or trans person, since this country is getting worse and worse at dealing with its raging homophobia/transphobia. Even in Minnesota we’ve got self-righteous busybodies harassing people on mere suspicion that they aren’t straight and cis. You can’t even go to a restaurant without someone demanding to inspect your breasts.

According to Gender Justice attorneys, Gerika Mudra went out for dinner with a friend at a Buffalo Wild Wings location in Owatonna. She went to the restroom, and a server allegedly followed her and banged on the door, calling her a man and yelling at her to leave.

Attorneys say Mudra unzipped her sweatshirt to show the server her chest.

In a statement, Mudra said she was shocked by the server’s behavior.

I’m wondering what grounds the server had for pounding on the door if she had been a trans woman? What cause does anyone have for interrupting someone who is peeing? Is that a crime?

It’s not just trans folk who are under attack. Remember Kim Davis, the awful religious kook who refused to do her job as a county clerk and would not issue marriage licenses to gay couples? She’s back. She is petitioning the Supreme Court to overthrow the Obergefell v Hodges decision that legalized gay marriage.

Ten years after the Supreme Court extended marriage rights to same-sex couples nationwide, the justices this fall will consider for the first time whether to take up a case that explicitly asks them to overturn that decision.

Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for six days in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple on religious grounds, is appealing a $100,000 jury verdict for emotional damages plus $260,000 for attorneys fees.

This is preliminary. The court could review the petition in the fall and decide not to take up the case…but come on. This court? It’s packed with conservative kooks who are slavering at the thought of overturning gay rights. They want to roll back everything, and they’ve shown willingness. Brown v. Board of Education? Loving v. Virginia? They don’t feel secure anymore.

It’s not just court cases. This administration is willing to deny people they don’t like their rightfully earned rewards.

The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits. One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move.

I have no confidence in anything gained in citizen’s rights in this country since the Civil War.

I’m supposed to be on sabbatical!

Fall semester begins next week. That means that we’re having all kinds of meetings this week.

I just got back from a morning of meetings. Tomorrow will be worse: I’ll be in meetings all day long.

But wait, you say, aren’t you on sabbatical? I am, but it’s a one semester leave, I have to get back in the saddle in January, and they present a lot of new stuff at the start of fall term, including some significant changes to the Morris Core Curriculum, so I had to show up this week so that I’m not clueless for spring term.

It was not fun. I found myself thinking that Aristotle never had to count credits, but I’m feeling like I’m supposed to be an accountant, with 7 (or is it 8?) categories that students have to work through in order to graduate. We also were given a 10-page assortment of information that we must include in our syllabi…which has me wondering, if every single class every term has to include all this same stuff, isn’t that a massive duplication of effort? And are any students going to bother to read all this repetitive material, most of which has nothing to do with the content of my courses? Twenty five years ago, when I started here, every syllabus had a paragraph or two of boilerplate at the end, with a link to where the student can get more details.

Now the curriculum is a collection of fiddly little details and every syllabus has a massive addendum that dwarfs the actual description of course content.

Good thing I just have one more day of administrative noise, and then 15+ weeks of blissful spider research which might reduce my cranky surliness a bit.

But don’t count on it.

Dictator Trump is mad

Using the pretext of one mugging of one of his cronies, Donald Trump is sending 800 National Guard troops to take over Washington DC. This is a gross overreaction on his part, but it’s his first impulse: let’s use unnecessary force in inappropriate ways to punish a blue city. It’s disgusting, it’s undemocratic, it’s un-American, it’s tinpot tyranny.

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was among officials joining Trump on the podium, said 800 national guard troops would take to the streets of Washington over the coming week. “They will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,” he said.

Trump, who lost the presidential election in DC to Democrat Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points, added that he may send in the military “if needed”.

By invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the president is federalising DC’s Metropolitan police department for the first time in its history. He said he was declaring a public safety emergency and putting the police under the control of the attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Trump vowed to allow police to “do whatever the hell they want” in the face of provocations. “That’s the only language they [alleged criminals] understand. They like to spit in the face of the police. You spit, and we hit, and they get hit real hard.”

No, you cannot allow the police to do whatever they want. The police are required to be bound by the rule of law. Sending in the military is a criminal act by a lawless, corrupt president.

Washington DC is just his test case. If he is allowed to get away with this, you’re next.

The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting.

Tim Walz knows Trump is itching to send the army in to crush all those cities that voted Democratic — you can bet Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland are also high on his hit list.

This is a fascist takeover. React appropriately.

Bats!

We know we have a lot of bats living above our garage — it’s non-trivial to check, though. There’s an access panel in the garage ceiling and you need to use a ladder to climb up there. But I imagine it might look a little like this if you climbed up and rummaged around behind the insulation.

I think maybe we’ll leave our bat colony alone.

He’s useless

It’s cute how the awareness that Jordan Peterson is just a cranky, opinionated ass is slowly seeping into the general zeitgeist.

Don’t worry that this perception is going to hurt Peterson. I’ve found estimates of his net worth that range from $10 million to $90 million. He really should just sit back, hang out with his family, take long vacations, maybe get a hobby (spider watching is a good one). We’d all be better for it.

Whooosh, boom!

This is what NASA does. They launch stuff to smash into asteroids, and I’m here for it. Here’s a video of the final seconds of the DART space probe, before it smashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos (Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos). Wheee!

That video ends abruptly, as you’d expect. The probe launched a separate camera to record the collision, though, and that looks like this:


Why was this collision so strange? In 2022, to develop Earth-saving technology, NASA deliberately crashed the DART spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos. The hope was that this collision would alter the trajectory of Dimorphos around its parent asteroid Didymos and so demonstrate that similar collisions could, in theory, save the Earth from being hit by (other) hazardous asteroids. But analyses of new results show that the effects of the collision are different than expected — and we are trying to understand why. Featured here is the time lapse video taken by the ejected LICIACube camera LUKE showing about 250 seconds of the expanding debris field of Dimorphos after the collision, with un-impacted Didymos passing in the foreground. In 2026, Europe’s Hera mission will reach the asteroids and release three spacecraft to better study the matter.

Very pretty. All those rocks and dust streaming out of the moonlet…

It’s since been acting a bit weird, although more accurately, we ought to say that it acted unpredictably. The moonlet exhibited a slight slow deceleration for a prolonged period.

The DART team has since confirmed that Dimorphos did indeed continue slowing in its orbit up to a month after the impact — however, their calculations show an additional slowdown of 15 seconds, rather than a full minute. A month after the DART collision, the slowdown plateaued.

What caused Dimorphos to slow steadily for a month, before reaching equilibrium? A swarm of space rocks could be to blame: Recent observations of the asteroid have revealed a vast field of boulders — likely shaken loose from Dimorphos’ surface during the impact — strewn about the area. It’s possible that some of the larger boulders fell back onto Dimorphos within that first month, slowing its orbit further than anticipated, DART team member Harrison Agrusa told New Scientist.

I guess we have another reason to think the movie Armageddon was schlock. We can’t calculate the ultimate outcome of space collisions — there are just too many parameters.