We just tossed up one giant spider, a couple of smaller spiders, and the dessicated, skeletal corpse of a scientist next to our driveway. Preparations complete. We also have a bag of 200 pieces of candy waiting to be devoured by someone other than ourselves.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
Found lurking in our bedroom, an assassin!
Masked Hunter (Reduvius personatus)
It has been courteously escorted off the premises.
I’ve been experimenting with feeding regimens for the spiders. What I’ve been doing is feeding twice a week with an excess of fruit flies until I feel like they’re big enough for mealworms. My feelings about their readiness for larger food are not reliable, and lately I’ve been seeing that these spiders are eager to hunt big game. Maybe I’ve been underestimating them.
So I lined up 15 containers with juvenile black widows, ranging from little guys about 5mm long to roughly twice that, and put a mealworm in each one. Then I left them alone, going to a meeting for an hour. I came back to a horrible sight.
Mealworms are like the cows or sheep of the invertebrate feedstock. They are quiet grazers that eat our vegetable scraps and don’t move very fast. I came back to all these containers of frantic, squirming, wiggling worms, they were writhing, flailing as if in agony. The spiders, even the smallest, were darting in to deliver small bites. A full grown spider would inject enough venom to kill quickly, within minutes, but these little fellows required multiple attacks to get a slow kill. It was ugly, and I felt sorry for the worms.
I came back the next day. All of them were dead, but in various states of digestion, from drained to blackening. My little carnivores are fierce and ruthless.
I’m going to have to change up my feeding schedule, switching from Drosophila, which are apparently little more than quick snacks to them, to mealworms as soon as they’ve got fangs big enough to puncture the cuticle. I should be able to cut back feeding from twice a week to once a week. I’ll just have to swallow my guilt.
Deservedly or not, Harvard is the premiere research institution in the US, internationally renowned, magnificently endowed, so it’s shocking that Trump is demolishing our research capabilities nationwide.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.
The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.
We’re used to thinking that STEM departments are safe…but no more.
The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.
The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.
This isn’t just Harvard — universities across the country are tightening their belts to the point that whole disciplines are getting chopped. How do we recover from this?
All Trump knows how to do is destroy, just like he’s demolishing the east wing of the White House.
That’s symbolic of how this administration will be seen by history: a flag waving over a wrecking crew.
I am resting at home, weak and weary, my knees knackered, because I have been on a quest that sent me staggering all over town. A quest that has ended in failure.
Where it began was the weather, freezing cold, bitter and blustery, conjoined with the fact that my wife labors every night until almost the midnight hour, when she comes home, tired and cold, to fall into bed seeking warmth and rest. I, on the other hand, am already in bed at that hour, and I am well insulated and tending to run hot; I’ve nestled down in snug pocket of sheets, blanket, and quilt, a cozy burrow of comfortable warmth, sleeping contentedly. My wife naturally reaches over to my side of the bed with feet like blocks of ice and fingers like icicles. This is a shocking trauma every night.
I decided to implement an easy, inexpensive solution: a pair of hot water bottles, low-tech and simple. The idea being that they would warm her side of the bed before she got in, she would clutch one to her chilly breast, and rest her frosty toes on the other, sparing me the frosty nightly surprise. Surely, this would be an easy quest!
First I visited the pharmacy on the far side of town. They were pleasant and helpful, and not so helpfully pointed out the shelf where these items were normally available. It is the onset of winter in Minnesota, unsurprisingly, the shelf was empty.
I crossed the street to Dollar Tree, it’s aisles cluttered with boxes and its staff hard at work taking down the Halloween supplies and putting up Christmas decorations. “Already?” I thought, but asked a clerk anyway. They had no idea if they ever had such things.
Disappointed, I trudged up the street to Homestead, a Walmart wanna-be run by a local fundamentalist church. I was reluctant, because I have been in this store before, and it hurts my brain…but at least they weren’t taking down the Halloween displays, because they never put them up in the first place, and their Christmas displays were just the Jesus merchandise they always have on show. They have a housewares section and a pharmacy, so maybe they would serve my needs, even as the constant tinkly worship music battered at my ears, frustrated at my lack of soul. I wandered about, before asking clerk if they had water bottles. “NO!” she exclaimed with outraged confidence, as if she feared I had sinful plans with such a diabolical device.
My last hope was the Ace Hardware store in town, which has an eclectic collection of miscellaneous household gear, but alas, no hot water bottles.
So I have come home, a frustrated failure, and turned to Amazon to order from the wicked Bezos.
They will not arrive until Friday.
I dread tonight, when in the darkness I hear the door open at midnight, and I will lie trembling in bed for the ice queen to slip between the sheets and reach over with Arctic claws to rip down my spine.
Imagine if universities tried to purge conservatives from our faculty. There’d be well-deserved protests from within the university as well as from without. We have strictly enforced policies for our hiring committees to prevent that from happening: our HR instructs us in the rules before every interview. You don’t get to ask candidates about politics, religion, or family matters…you interview exclusively on their qualifications to teach and do research.
This is not the policy when your administration is authoritarian and far right, and Texan.
Gov. Greg Abbott admitted in an X post on Sunday that Texas is purging professors with “leftist ideologies” — and people are not happy.
Abbott’s directive fits into a pattern of faculty changes and government interference on campuses across the state, including the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Texas State University.
“Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Abbott wrote in his post. “We must end indoctrination and return to education fundamentals at all levels of education.”
They must end indoctrination by purging the universities of people who oppose your ideological indoctrination. That’s blatant. No ideology but our ideology.
Univ. of Texas professor was dismissed from an administrative post overseeing university academic affairs because of ideological differences.
Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.
We…
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 19, 2025
He’s a fucking fascist.
I thought they were ugly, stupid, and pointless a few years ago, but apparently, there’s still a market for them.
Wait until they realize they don’t own them after all — they all belong to Amazon, and when Amazon sneezes, the bored apes all curl up and die.
Amazon owns everything, and the recent loss of service also meant that the Canvas application we use for teaching was having seizures, too. Fortunately, I wasn’t teaching this term, and even if I was, I go to class with all my teaching stuff stored locally on my laptop. Because I’m not a dumbass.
I don’t normally read the Daily Wire, but they baited me with that title in an email. It’s classic DW: reduce a complex issue to a single point, challenge a group of people with it, and claim victory when they don’t get a simple answer. It’s what they did with the “what is a woman” question, and it was the entirety of Charlie Kirk’s “debate” strategy. So yes, confront people who aren’t expecting a quiz while point cameras and microphones at them, and most will freeze and be more inarticulate. That doesn’t mean you’ve won something, it means you’ve exploited normal human social awkwardness.
I would answer that he’s flouted the constitution, has essentially declared war on states that don’t support his policies, is capricious and arbitrary in his decisions, and is trying to neutralize the checks and balances of the Republic. I’m sure you all could write whole paragraphs citing his self-serving actions.
But DW goes on to point out the horrors of the No Kings protests. Such violence!
Some protests took unsettling turns. A disturbing video from Chicago shows a middle-aged woman making a gun gesture with her hand and pointing to her neck. Towards the end of the D.C. protest, a chant broke out that “Turning Point has got to go.” Many signs featured rhetoric claiming “Trump was a Nazi” and “ICE = Gestapo.” A small fragment of the protest made the event a family affair with children holding signs such as “Stop Kidnapping People.”
Yes? I don’t get what the concern is about pointing finger guns at your own neck, and I agree that TPUSA is toxic and that there is a strong resonance between the Republican party and Nazis. And please, please, please do stop kidnapping people.
I think the right wing is floundering.
JD Vance and Pete Hegseth know how to hurt Californians: on short notice, they shut down I-5 for four hours while the army fired live ammunition over the freeway. Why, I don’t know — it’s a pointless and risky exercise. Then there was a misfire, and a shell detonated prematurely over the freeway, spattering (harmlessly, fortunately) the police blocking the road with shrapnel.
This is insane.
Why do this at all, other than to let Hegseth flaunt his machismo? And maybe intimidate the citizenry a little bit. Have no fear, the military makes excuses.
A spokesperson for the Marine Corps told CBS News that the incident was under investigation.
“We are aware of the report of a possible airborne detonation of a 155mm artillery round outside the designated impact area during the U.S. Marine Corps Amphibious Capabilities Demonstration at Camp Pendleton, CA, Oct. 18,” said a statement from USMC, in part. “The demonstration went through a rigorous safety evaluation, and deliberate layers of redundancy, to ensure the safety of fellow citizens. Following established safety protocols, firing was suspended. No injuries occurred and the demonstration concluded as scheduled. An investigation has been initiated. We are committed to determining the incident’s root cause and applying findings to future missions.”
They did nothing wrong! And they will investigate to find out what happened.
I think what happened is that a pair of incompetent MAGA scoundrels meddled with an exercise to get them to stupidly fire big dangerous guns over the freeway, because they like pushing people around.
They are quite small. Here’s one stroking Abraham Lincoln’s cheek.
You can also see the juvenile coloration — the adults wil be solid black, with just a red mark on the ventral abdomen. One thing I noticed was that when I put them in a container with a jumble of moss, they practically disappear, even with the bright red markings. More than once I transferred a spider to a new container and lost it, and had to poke around to be sure I hadn’t accidentally set it free on the lab bench.
