Mighty Morphin’ Spiders

Last month, I thought I’d found a color morph in S. triangulosa: some recently caught wild spiders from Wisconsin that were almost solid black, with just a hint of the standard pattern. I figured I’d be able to do some crosses this summer and see if it was heritable.

Now I don’t need to! Look at the difference a month in the lab environment makes.

[I try not to splash spiders in your face here. You’ll have to look it up on Instagram or Patreon.]

That’s the same spider, almost a month apart. Now it looks all the other spiders I’ve got. I suspect it’s got to be something about the change in diet, from whatever they were finding in a garage to a steady diet of fruit flies and mealworms.

They were caught in Wisconsin, where they’d been living on cheese curds, brats, and La Croix, probably.

Also note that this spider has made a couple of egg sacs. The one in the top right is a half-assed mess, only a few eggs only partially wrapped in a thin skein of silk.

Tower of Spiders

We’re currently isolating all freshly laid egg sacs and tagging them with the date so that we know exactly how old the embryos are. This week I started scanning all the adult containers and setting aside those who had produced an egg sac.

It started out well: one on Sunday, one on Tuesday, one on Thursday, and I’m thinking this is perfect — a fresh batch of 30+ embryos every other day is what we can handle easily. Then then this morning, Friday, I come in and…5 new egg sacs for 21 April.

Then I realize…Thursday is quarter taps night at the Met Lounge downtown. Have they been sneaking out for a wild party night, and then coming back to the lab all primed for reproduction? That’s the only rational explanation.

I could be concerned that I’m going to be in another situation where the lab is drowning in more spiders than we know what to do with, but we’re about to switch paradigms a little bit. Next week we start plunking lots of embryos into fixative, then the week after we start doing embryo dissections and staining with propidium iodide. None of these spiders are going to live to adulthood. Sorry.

I was wondering what that stench was

I have been informed that the Slymepit is dead. The Slymepit was an online forum that was set up in the wake of Elevatorgate, when a small group of atheists decided to set up a base from which to hurl racist, sexist, homophobic slurs at Social Justice Warriors like Rebecca Watson, Stephanie Zvan, Jey McCreight, and many others, including me. It was one of the uglier sides of the internet, although its fans viewed it differently.

The Slymepit, a long-running atheist discussion board heavily involved in the A/S activism ‘Schism’, is shutting its doors after a ten-year run. Creator and host, ‘Lsuoma’, decided that the conversation, often humorous, insightful, and informative, but also at times pugnacious, scurrilous, or garrulous, had strayed too far from the site’s original purpose of “exposing the stupidity, lies, and hypocrisy of Social Justice Warriors.” Live commenting has therefore been shut down, with ten years of comments and user-created artwork archived.

(If you’d like to see examples of the Slymepit’s creativity, RationalWiki has you covered.)

OK, fine, you get to elide over the Slymepit’s many sins during its funeral. Goodbye, you won’t be missed.

Although I’m immensely amused by this comment:

The Pit’s greatest strength was always that it never took itself seriously. That really frustrated those who so fervently hated and obsessed over us.

Dude. The pit was frenetically abusive, regularly focused howling obscenities at individuals who dared to think social justice was an important cause, and took itself painfully seriously. You were on a mission to destroy people.

As for the “obsession” part — your little clubhouse of haters rotted out and collapsed six months ago, and no one, other than your fellow bigots, even noticed until now.

If anyone wants to find the Slymepit gang today, they’re usually hanging out on Jerry Coyne’s blog.

Groomers for Christ in Texas

The Texas senate approved this bill.

S.B. 1515 would require Texas public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. At present, Texas public schools have no such requirement, and this legislation only became legally feasible with the United States Supreme Court’s opinion last year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 142 S. Ct. 2407 (2022), which overturned the Lemon test under the Establishment Clause (found in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)) and instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition.

That’s not all!

The Senate also gave final passage to Senate Bill 1396, authored by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which would allow public and charter schools to adopt a policy requiring every campus to set aside a time for students and employees to read the Bible or other religious texts and to pray.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement that both bills are wins for religious freedom in Texas.

I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind, he said. Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back to our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans.

Somehow, forcing a sectarian version of religion on school children is now being labeled “religious freedom.”

I’m wondering how all those conservative atheists regard this development.

Elon Musk is the damned soul leading us through the social media hellscape

The Musk rat had a very bad day yesterday.

Tesla Inc. disappointed investors with its first-quarter results, sending the electric-car maker’s shares down 9.75% on Thursday to $162.99. An experimental Starship rocket designed by SpaceX achieved liftoff in Boca Chica, Texas, only to explode about four minutes later in a fiery ball above the Gulf of Mexico. And on Twitter, as Musk promised weeks ago, many users lost their legacy blue checkmarks for choosing not to pay $8 per month for the privilege.

When it comes to the billionaire’s net worth, Tesla’s sinking share price had the most immediate consequences. His wealth dropped by $12.6 billion as a result, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his biggest decline this year. His stake in Tesla, including shares and options, makes up the biggest part of his $163.9 billion fortune, though SpaceX has become more important as its valuation soars.

The stupid blue checkmark thing is all the rage on Twitter. It’s Musk’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable by charging $8 for a little blue symbol on your account, but few people are taking him up on it, and mainly they are conservative twits begging for approval from senpai. Some famous people are refusing to pay for it, which is a bad look (what good is a status symbol if high-status people reject it?), so Musk gave Lebron James, Stephen King, and Willam Shatner the blue check for free…and then the nobodies started clamoring for a free check mark, too.

His get-rich-quick scheme of selling a pointless blue logo is flopping. Oh no, quick, his capitalist brain thinks of a way to force people to buy it…I know, it said, compel your advertisers, the only people bringing in revenue, to pay for it!

What a super-genius.

At least it’s not Parler. Parler has already closed up shop, and its former employees are scrabbling for ways to open alternatives.

“Parler management are straight up f*ggots,” Dennis Harrison, whose LinkedIn identifies him as a lead engineer at the company, wrote in a private Discord server this past Sunday. “They ruined something good.”

I’m sure Dennis will find a way to express himself elsewhere. I don’t think I’ll be interested in any company he engineers, but sure, he sounds like a genius of Musk’s calibre.

“We’re getting an entity setup so we can take donations/money whatever to help with some of the costs,” the former Parler engineer wrote on the Discord channel. “Currently about $300 a month just for the dev stuff.”

“Once we start making it public, that will go up to $500 a month, I bet,” he continued.

Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes on social media, here’s another: Align Us, an app that lets users rate businesses on a conservative to progressive scale, so you can boycott them. I’m not at all interested — I know that all businesses are pro-business, so what more information do I need? — and I also don’t believe in the companies claim of neutrality.

In the wake of “Go Woke, Go Broke”, consumers are feeling highly motivated that they can make a difference in society simply by where they spend (or don’t spend) their hard-earned money. They want to know that when they support a business, that business isn’t going to spend it with organizations or give money as political donations to an agenda that goes against their values.

The site has a number of advertisers — they all seem to be niche conservative weirdos, like Mammoth Nation (totally a grift) and Law Enforcement Today. It’s also badly coded, frequently popping up an alert to tell you it’s struggling, along with quotes from people like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Sowell, and then not being able to find any business near you and instead handing you a link to a random review of a company in Chicago. Did you know that Frito-Lay Inc. is liberal? Put those corn chips back on the shelf.

I’m learning that “Go Woke, Go Broke” is not a thing. It is obvious that putting right-wing ideologues in charge of anything, whether it’s the Supreme Court of a website, leads to catastrophic failure.

Since when is America fair?

It’s heart-wrenching what various states are doing to trans people, especially young trans people. Missouri, you suck.

Also, Texas, you suck. Florida, you suck. Tennessee, you suck. I could go on with this list, but basically, if any state has a Republican legislature or governor, it is a cesspool of cruelty. Stop electing those people, OK?

All sheriffs are bad, too

They’re just cops in cowboy hats, you know. Anyway, a small town newspaper in Oklahoma left a recording device in a meeting room when various county officials had a meeting. He “wanted to prove that officials were discussing county business after the meeting had ended in violation of the state’s open-meeting law.” He got a bit more than he expected.

A small newspaper in rural Oklahoma secretly recorded what it said was an illegal public meeting where a county official talked about hanging Black people and several officials spoke of hiring hit men and digging holes for two of the newspaper’s reporters.

Them good ol’ boys were having a grand time chatting about all the crimes they wanted to commit: killing troublesome reporters, hanging black folk, all the stuff we usually just imagine rotten county officials talking about in back room meetings. They do!

Jennings: It’s like somebody wanting this job, they don’t realize, like your job. I heard it the other day, said I heard 2 or 12 people were going for sheriff. I said fuck, lets get 20. They don’t have a goddamn clue what they’re getting into. Not this day and age. I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for fucking sheriff.

Sheriff: Yeah. Well, It’s not like that nomore.

Jennings: I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.

It’s no fair, nowadays Black people have the right to not be hanged. Makes a fella pine for the good ol’ days.

You know, these kinds of attitudes don’t just spring up out of nowhere. It says the leading citizens of that Oklahoma town have a culture that accepts casual racism and that wallows in their privilege. Fire the lot of them.

Their defense is now that it was illegal to record their conversation. They said the things, you just weren’t supposed to hear them.

At least it’s reassuring that real brave journalism still exists in small pockets around the country.

Can we debate about how remote the desert island debate bros should be abandoned on should be?

“Great!” I thought, a new ContraPoints video. “Oh no,” I thought, it’s almost two hours long. I put off listening to it until last night (you don’t have to actually watch it, it’s a good audio stream, too), and now I can say: it’s excellent. Partly I’m saying that because I 100% agree with her on everything in the video.

It’s all good, but my favorite part was in the middle, at about the 58 minute mark, where she rips into the debate bros.

…valuing dispassionate intellectualism above all else can cause problems, especially where topics of social justice are concerned. Because it can lead you to this kind of toxic centrism that asks, why are marginalized people so unwilling to have calm, philosophical debates about whether they should have rights? Are they afraid of dangerous ideas?

As examples, she then talks about Sam Harris (he’s on the wrong side, again) and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. It’s a calm, philosophical discussion that exposes those wankers as absolute dickheads.

It’s a good listen, take some time to tune in.