The most horrible video I’ve ever made

This will be popular, sure.

My compost bin is extraordinarily productive in producing maggots, which makes the spiders living in there very happy. The resolution here isn’t great — I used my el cheapo camera, since I was plunging it down in close to the writhing mass of larvae. If anyone insists, I suppose I could redo this with a reasonably good macro lens.

Everything is real time — no time-lapse. That’s how fast they move! Also, listen carefully and you can hear them eating. It sounds a bit like soggy rice krispies.

It’s only a minute long, so don’t worry, it ends quickly. If anyone also insists, I could record a much longer video.

No one will insist.

I know this will make some people queasy, so I’m hiding it below the fold.

[Read more…]

The skunk is free!

I tried calling the authorities about our little skunk problem.

The humane society wasn’t equipped to deal with skunks. They suggested I call the police.

The police (who have been disbanded) couldn’t do anything. They suggested I call the DNR.

The DNR doesn’t have any officers in town. They suggested I call the police. When I said I had, they told me I’m on my own.

So…I threw an old tarp over the cage, opened the door while wearing goggles and heavy gloves, and the skunk scurried off to our backyard without mishap, fortunately, although the tarp is now rather stinky. Unfortunately, though, we found out where our skunk family lives: under our deck.

Which fantasy is hurting America more?

Oh gosh. We know what to blame for our current situation now. Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America! I heard this same claim back in the 1970s, although usually the argument was that it was the Satanic imagery that was going to invoke occult forces. This guy takes a different tack — he’s going to invoke Steve Bannon as an authority. I prefer the occult forces.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

“‘Now, who’s more real?’ Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax?” Senior writes. Bannon realizes that “some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

OK, this isn’t very interesting or surprising. Yes, people can be inspired by stories, can identify with a cause greater than themselves. This has always been true. It’s not unique to video games, but has been the foundation of religious and political movements for millennia. It’s just that occasionally someone decides that finding identity in a cause is bad when they dislike the cause (like videogames), while simultaneously saying that finding identity is a cause is good when it’s something they like (like Christianity). This article is the same old story — video games bad, Christianity good, therefore the only problem is which fantasy you choose to follow.

I can at least credit the author for realizing he could be walking into a trap. Why isn’t his Christian fantasy also dangerously seductive and misleading people’s lives? Easy. Because Christianity is different.

Yet the way of Jesus is quite different. A Christian vision of heaven is not Valhalla with wine (or grape juice) instead of mead. Valhalla—and almost every other pagan vision of an afterlife—looks backward. It’s the echo and celebration of the warrior’s success in the life that was.

The kingdom of God doesn’t find meaning there. It brings meaning by joining our stories with an altogether different narrative—the story of Jesus. His life is our life. His glory is our glory. And Jesus redefines what wisdom and power really are—by embracing an object found most baffling by the Romans and other pagans of his day: the cross.

When we start to really understand and embody that in our churches, maybe fewer Daves will find their identities in either accounts payable or Ajax online. Maybe more of them will see that there’s glory in the ordinary, in giving your life away for the people you love.

Except…he’s still saying that believing in religion is a way to find “glory”. It’s still a tool to trick people into thinking their mundane lives can be made “glorious” by layering on a belief in a fantasy. Maybe also he should take a look at some of the Christian iconography out there — these would fit perfectly into the imagery of a fantasy role playing game.

If World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons are hurting America, I think a better case could be made that the biggest role playing game of them all, evangelical Christianity, is destroying the country.

Morning surprise

We’ve had an animal raiding our compost bin late at night. They’ve been burrowing underneath to get at the rotting vegetables in there, and then scattering them over the yard. This isn’t good. The bin is there to keep the decaying organic material confined rather than just flung about all over the place.

We’ve had this problem before — a couple of times now, we’ve had groundhogs living under our deck. We have a humane trap that we use to catch them and then we transport them a few miles away to somewhere near the Pomme de Terre river, where we release them. This is practically routine now.

So we set up the trap last night, went to bed, and bright and early this morning I go out to check on things. I blithely stroll out to the other side of the garage, and…oh shit.

I backed away quickly. I know that skunks can easily spray 10 or 20 feet, and are shockingly accurate (they aim for the eyes). They can also be mean little guys. This is about the worst thing we could have caught.

My current plan is to wait until 9 to call the local animal control office and make sure they don’t have a policy for dealing with wild animals in city limits. Then if I must I’ll approach the cage with garbage bags as a shield and open it up and let Pepe LePew go.

Lesson learned. Don’t set traps unless you’re prepared to deal with what you catch!

Happiness is a pocket full of maggots and spider eggs

Our compost bin is thriving! We found some new egg sacs inside it, like this one:

It’s strange. It’s orange. We suspect it might be Mimetus, the pirate spider, but time will tell. I took it into the lab and will have to wait for it to hatch out.
The other compost development is that it is full of squirmy busy maggots. I’m talking dense sheets of a multitude of swarming maggots. I scooped up some and brought them in to see if the spiders would eat them. They liked it! (The spiders, not the larvae.) This will be an alternate food source, at least over the summer. I think it’ll slow down a lot once the temperature drops below freezing.
In other news, I’ve been doing weekly measurements of the growth of my Steatoda triangulosa babies. They’re all (except one, sort of) growing well. Here’s a table of the mean dimensions of the young spiders.

I know, not exactly exciting, and I have to plod through more weeks of measurements. Note the big surge in length this week! That’s because they all molted on Day 22, and shedding that exoskeleton gave them more room to stretch.
I mentioned one spider was an exception. Spider #5 is looking a bit odd. Still growing, but suddenly their limbs and palps have gone pale…I’m hoping they’re not sick.

A different perspective

Many spider papers feature detailed closeups of their genitalia, because genitals are often diagnostic of the species. They’re often weird and twisty and convoluted, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they often focus exclusively on the palps, the male genitalia because they’re entirely external and easy to see and the female side of things get short shrift. It’s the same for humans!

So here you go! If you ever wondered about the internal shape of the vagina, it’s been done.

How strange. It’s roomier than I expected. There’s also a series of photos that show the variations. Neat!

How to undermine Alzheimer’s research

Stop smiling already.

Uh-oh. As I get older, I’d like to think science will come up with treatments for cognitive decline (don’t worry, I’m not showing any symptoms…yet. I don’t think. How would I know?), and Alzheimer’s is serious problem. Judging by the fact that we always get a couple of seminars on Alzheimer’s from our graduating seniors, it’s of concern to even young people. Unfortunately, every prospective drug against the disease seems to flop in clinical trials. It’s entirely possible that 16 years of research has been misled by one study that identified a candidate amyloid protein as the causal agent.

The first author of that influential study, published in Nature in 2006, was an ascending neuroscientist: Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota (UMN), Twin Cities. His work underpins a key element of the dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which holds that Aβ clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness, which afflicts tens of millions globally. In what looked like a smoking gun for the theory and a lead to possible therapies, Lesné and his colleagues discovered an Aβ subtype and seemed to prove it caused dementia in rats.

Why did it have to be the University of Minnesota?

That initial paper that set the field charging off in a specific direction seems to have been fraudulent.

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Lesné has gone silent. The university is investigating. Lawyers are, I’m sure, standing by with bated breath.

The evidence is built around Western blots, which are used to resolve individual proteins from a sample. A bunch of the published (and some of the unpublished) data show unmistakeable, unambiguous evidence of tampering, and someone in that lab was clearly going into the data and patching it up to look more convincing. Human eyes aren’t very good at detecting slight variations in a semi-random smear of pixels, but computers excel at it, and the evidence of copy/pasting and merging jump out at you.

Why does anyone pull this kind of crap with their data? If the raw data doesn’t show it, if it can’t be extracted with a statistical analysis of the original image, it doesn’t exist. You can’t compensate for a negative result by artificially pasting the result you wanted in place.

This is a catastrophe. One ambitious researcher faked data in order to get a paper in Nature, and now it’s a quarter billion dollar industry built on a false foundation.

The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.

The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”

Great. Forgery and confirmation bias make a terrific pairing.

The nose knows

The latest gender critical outrage: the Women’s March logo has 3 profiles, and one of them doesn’t look feminine enough. It must be a man, baby!

There are no women on planet Earth who have a face anything like the one on that alien creature on the left! As we all know, you can reliably determine the sex of an individual from the shape of their nose. Or something. It’s biology, man.

Oh, here’s a fun game! I found a page of cameo portraits of Victorian ladies, with lots of photos of Victorian…uh, women. I’m not sure anymore. According to the GCs, the British empire must have been built by brave men who kept a trans woman at home, since there are a lot of deviations from the dainty feminine ideal there.

They’re all quite lovely — these were intended to be flattering portraits of their subjects — but I’m sure the GCs could pull out their calipers and determine that the majority were men in wigs.

Also, biology would tell you that not only is there a tremendous amount of variation in human facial features, but human perception is finely tuned to recognize those variations.

I’m supposed to thank someone for Friday?

Today is my dull working day.

First up: I gotta go walk a kilometer or two. I’m not in physical therapy now, but I do have to keep up with some exercise.

Secondly, it’s a spider feeding day, and sheesh, but I have a lot of baby spiders who want their living, crawling meat.

Thirdly, I’ve got my Skepticon talk all outlined up in Keynote, with some of the images. Now I have to flesh everything out. The goal is to have it all done this weekend. Gone are the days when I would check into a hotel the night before and hack out the whole talk!

Is this my summer break? Could be worse, I guess.