This is one of the black widow females I just moved into roomier quarters.
It does not have a red back. Our North American widows are a solid black, with a red hourglass on the underside of the abdomen.
This is one of the males, currently separated.
Seriously dimorphic, which is why he won’t be introduced until the female is fed again, and I can keep on eye on her shenanigans.
An Australian reader sent me this photo of a redback, the Aussie version of Latrodectus. So pretty! And with an egg sac!
That reminds me…this is a big week in the lab, I hope. My second generation black widows are looking ready for breeding, so that means I have to prepare the nuptials. I’m moving the females to a larger, cleaner container and giving them time to make a cozy web today. Tomorrow I’m giving them a feast — gotta fill ’em up so they aren’t hungry when a visitor comes calling. Then on Friday I’m introducing them to second generation males.
I’m a little nervous about that. As usual, males are less common than females — more of them die during development. But the big concern is sexual dimorphism. Latrodectus males are so much daintier and distinctly tinier than the females, so it could be a bloodbath in two days. I’ll record video of the event, and maybe if it isn’t too disappointing I’ll post it then.
First, it was recognizing that conservative Republicans are “weird,” out of touch with common values. Now he has absolutely perfectly pegged Elon Musk: he’s a dipshit.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on Tuesday joked that Elon Musk is Trump’s real “running mate,” and mocked him for jumping “like a dipshit” on stage with Donald Trump earlier this month.
“I’m going to talk about his running mate,” Walz said during a campaign rally in Wisconsin. “His running mate Elon Musk.”
“Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things,” the Minnesota governor said. “You know it.”
Oh man, that brought back memories of my father, a bedrock union man and staunch Democrat, because that was one of his favorite words to describe clowns lacking in dignity and publicly making an ass of themselves. That’s Musk in a single word, a dipshit.
University of Minnesota took over the administration building yesterday.
The protest didn’t last long. The police charged in and have arrested 11 students and alumni. It’s the principle, though: they were protesting the university’s investment in Israel and our country’s bomb-making industries. It’s not as if the Democrats are working for peace, and you know the Republicans love them some civilian casualties, so it’s good that someone is raising a ruckus and declaring that genocide is not a good business decision.
One of the organizers, Juliet Murphy, had a few words for the administration.
“And I think we’re kind of calling it out at this point and saying, ‘You have always taught us that we should stand up for what we believe in, we should be the motivators for change, but yet, when it no longer benefits you, it doesn’t seem like you really want to continue having those conversations. It doesn’t seem like you really care about listening to your diverse student body,’” Murphy said.
The administration had a counter: you will be silent, you will be orderly, or you shall be ejected from the campus.
The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents voted in August to reject student calls for divestment from Israel — and to block most future student divestment campaigns.
The university also rolled out guidelines this summer stating demonstrations must be limited to 100 people and end by 10 p.m., and that they cannot use tents nor remain in buildings after scheduled closing hours, among other rules. Violation can result in immediate interim suspension, arrest and being barred from campus.
The smug, comfortable assholes on the Board of Regents really don’t get it: the whole point of a protest is to make the other side uncomfortable. Rejecting disagreement from a position of power does not resolve the point of contention, but only makes the opposition angrier and more determined.
Free Palestine. End the genocide. Divest now. Those are simple, clear ideas that won’t be answered by arresting people.
I never worked in a fast food joint, but I had lots of friends who did; it’s a common, mundane job experience for a lot of people. It’s not an extraordinary claim at all for someone to say they worked at a McDonald’s in their youth, but to Donald Trump it is some kind of unlikely experience, like claiming to be a UFO abductee. He’s been raging about Kamala Harris claiming to have worked in fast food 40 years ago, and thinks it is a winning argument to deny her experience.
To make his strange point, Trump volunteered to work at a McDonald’s over the weekend.
As Trump put it reporters when he got off his plane: “I’m going for a job right now at McDonald’s,” before adding, “I really wanted to do this all my life.”
I wish he had, although it would be unfair to the customers — he’d suck as an employee. But OK, he charged off to pretend to experience the life of a fast food worker.
One catch: he didn’t. The McDonald’s was closed and the streets cordoned off, while he walked in, spent a few minutes shuffling fries, and then handed out a few containers. That was it. It was a photo-op, nothing more.
Police closed the busy streets around the McDonald’s he was visiting and cordoned off the restaurant as a crowd a couple blocks long gathered, sometimes 10- to 15-deep, across the street straining to catch a glimpse of Trump. Horns honked and music blared as Trump supporters waved flags, held signs and took pictures.
It was a notable event to celebrate, the fact that Donald Trump did ten minutes of actual work.
You just know that in his future rambling babbles, he’s going to claim that Kamala Harris never worked in fast food, but he, the lazy phony, did.
I opened up the Washington Post this morning to see an article titled, what science says about the power of religion and prayer to heal. OK, I’ll bite. What does science say about the power of religion? The author begins with a little anecdote that says it all.
As a medical intern, I once treated a young woman with metastatic breast cancer, whose sparkling blue eyes looked up at me every morning with hope. I did as much as possible for her medically, but unfortunately, her cancer spread further. She developed ongoing fevers and nausea, and soon rarely glanced at me when I entered her room. Most of the days, she lay on her side, fatigued, her face turned to the wall.
She was Catholic, and one day, I noticed that a priest had started visiting her. A week later, when I entered the room, she looked up at me again and smiled. I sensed that she felt a renewed connection to something beyond her.
Sadly, she died a month later, but had seemed far less despondent. Her priest had offered her something that I could not.
Jesus, that’s grim. Noticing that a dying patient smiled at him once after a priest visited her is quite possibly the weakest, most pathetic evidence for the power of religion that I’ve ever heard. The patient died! Not only was she beyond the reach of prayer, but beyond the reach of medicine.
Oh, but we’re supposed to believe that fostering a positive outlook is a benefit. Why? Where’s the benefit? The best the author can do is tell us that polls show that 72% of Americans believe in the power of prayer…but that’s just telling us that a majority of Americans are gullible. Show me something that says it improves health outcomes, doctor!
He gives us four things that religion does.
But evidence suggests that having strong spiritual or religious beliefs, however defined, can assist psychologically in fighting, and coping with, illness. Here are some of the ways prayer and faith can affect patient health.
Brain changes: Neuroscience research shows that strong religious or spiritual beliefs are associated with thicker parts of the brain, providing neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair.
Purpose: Religion and spirituality, broadly defined, provide a sense of meaning, purpose and hope.
Meaning: Many patients come to find or construct their own sources of meaning. It may be through traditional faith or a belief in art, poetry, science, mathematics, nature or the universe. As one patient, who said he was “not religious,” once told me, “I believe in the Third Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroy; it merely goes on in another form.”
Social support: Religious and spiritual groups also commonly provide valuable social support and interactions. Such a group doesn’t need to be religious. It could be a yoga group, a book club, or a Facebook discussion group about Harry Potter.
I have a sense of “purpose,” but I am not religious. He undermines his statements about “meaning” and “social support” by mentioning that you don’t need religion to have them, so why demand that people follow a delusion to get them? By the way, that statement about the Third Law of Thermodynamics is not your salvation; if my house were to burn down, it’s no consolation to suggest that my home goes on as heat, gas, and ash.
But it’s his first claim that irritated me, this idea that religion/spirituality is associated with “thicker parts of the brain” that can provide “neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair”. WTF? How does that work?
That’s the only part of the article that includes a link, so I followed it to see what evidence he’s got. It leads to a systematic literature review published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it is a godawful hodgepodge of random results coupled to wishful thinking. It summarizes the observations made in EEG, PET scans, and fMRI to try and find a consistent, meaningful effect of religiosity on brain activity or morphology. It fails. It’s full of tables like this one.
You tell me: what does “greater posterior alpha” or “negative association between left medial orbitofrontal cortex volume and neurofeedback performance” mean in the sense of providing a benefit to the subject? Study after study is listed, and they all show different patterns of differences. These are all studies of religion/spirituality that, I would guess, are all looking for correlations of something, anything with religious belief, and they all publish whatever parameter they fish up. Never mind that religious experiences are diverse, or that the development of the brain is a complex process that is going to provide all kinds of spurious variations. You put people in complicated, sensitive machines, and you can get a number out. That’s publishable!
But what about that claim of neuronal reserves
that made my spidey sense tingle? Here’s the bit where the Harv Rev Psych article talks about it. I’ve emphasized the words that represent guesswork.
Taken together, it is reasonable to speculate that these brain regions represent access to a neural reserve that likely results from the process of neuroplasticity. A greater neural reserve could, in turn, support an enhanced cognitive reserve that enables R/S people to cope better with negative emotions, more readily disengage themselves from excessive self-referential thinking (e.g., rumination), and ultimately be more resilient in the face of various psychopathologies.
They have no evidence for any of that. Saying that something is a result of “neuroplasticity” is meaningless — I’d go so far as to say that most of the variation in the brain is from neuroplasticity. The existence of a “neural reserve” is hypothetical and not demonstrated at all. You can’t just point to a thickened chunk of cortex and call it a “reserve”! They then go on to suggest that these “reserves” enable religious/spiritual people to cope with negative emotions and be more resilient, phenomena that were not evaluated in any of the studies!
That paragraph was pure, unadulterated bullshit. You don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience to see that — it’s an unsubstantiated collection of wishful thinking that should not have passed peer review. The whole paper is a tremendous amount of work, sifting through a huge literature that is shot through with delusional vagueness, trying to extract a few reliable, useful interpretations, and not finding any. The paper does not find evidence of neuronal reserves that can buffer against depression and despair
, but that does not stop the WaPo writer from claiming positively that it does.
I am once again confirmed in my expectation that any attempt to justify religion with science is only going to produce bad science.
I’m back! Yesterday was a long day of travel — I got up a 5am to go to the airport, and what with the flight, then waiting to take a shuttle to the western part of the state, sitting on the shuttle, waiting for Mary to get off work and pick me up, and then the drive to Morris, it was 1am when I finally got home. I slept in until 9:30 this morning.
I think it’s going to be my last trip back to the homeland. My mother’s house is going on the market in a few weeks, after it’s stripped down to bare walls, and there won’t be anything to come home to anymore. That’s sad.
I’ve brought home a few mementoes, but it’s mainly a few pictures and selections from the vast collection of stuff Mom had filed away. She was a doting mother, so she kept everything related to her kids, most of which is going to be trashed this week. It all has to go! I plucked a few small things out of the pile to bring home.
I brought home a letter I wrote in 1979, because it immediately took me back to my first year of graduate school. It was a different world then. Remember: no internet, no computers, no cell phones, long distance phone calls would cost you a few dollars a minute, so you only used it for emergencies. That meant we had to write letters to keep in touch — and literally write by hand, because typewriters were the only alternative. I was writing a letter every week to my parents, writing to my grandparents every few weeks, and several times a week to my girlfriend. That was common in my generation.
Here it is. Do not mock my handwriting, treat it as a glimpse of the distant past.
OK, I’ll translate and give a little context.
3 August (1979)
Dear Mom + Dad + Tomi + Mike + Lisa + everybody,
That’s everyone who was still at home. My brother Jim and sister Caryn had moved out, too.
I had just completed my BS in Zoology at the University of Washington, was accepted into the University of Oregon, and had even been offered a research assistantship for the summer. No gap year for me! I went through commencement and immediately moved into a summer research program. I was living in a bare, nearly empty dorm dorm for the summer, which was not great — days spent in the lab were great, but then I’d go home to this empty, unfurnished room and stare at the walls until I fell asleep. I was writing because I was finally moving out to my own place.
I’ve got my new apartment today. It’s a small studio with a private bathroom, and I share the kitchen with the apartment next door, so it’s not very impressive physically, but it has a good price and I figure room+board won’t cost me much more than it would in the dorm. August rent is $120, + fall rent is $170 a month, with all utilities paid for. It’s very close to campus — it’s located right behind the 7-11, near about 3 bookstores (wrong–5 bookstores), 2 markets, + a couple of cafes. The manager is also a grad student who is involved with the biology dept., + arranged to get me the keys tonight, so I can start moving in tomorrow. I still have a week to go in the dorms, so I get one more week of food service, which will give me an easy transition into life on my own–I can just eat in the dorms until I figure out how to cook, + get set up to do it.
My new address:
735 E. 14th St., Apt 6A
Eugene, OR 97403
Look at that rent! Things have changed a bit.
Living in a reasonably sized college town was paradise. All those bookstores in walking distance! I spent so much money in the Smith Family Bookstore.
Work is coming along fairly well — for about a week now, I’ve been tangled up in about 3 projects, + I had to give a presentation of my research to a lab meeting today, so I’ve been pretty busy, what with finding an apartment on top of that. My little fish haven’t been behaving very well, either. They’ve been giving me cock-eyed results so this next week will be spent refining my set-up to get rid of some extraneous noise that has been fouling up my data. I’m also learning a little photography, since Dr. Kimmel wants me to start making a complete record of my experiments. It’s not high art, but I can take magnificent portraits of oscilloscope screens.
My first project was trying to reliably record extracellular action potentials from the zebrafish hindbrain. Electrophysiologists will know the feeling — carefully grounding everything, housing everything in a faraday cage, starting off every day making fresh sharp electrodes, etc. This is also the moment that Chuck Kimmel sent me spiralling down the photography game.
Because this was a poor student writing home, of course I had to talk about money.
Since I won’t have to be out on the 31st now, I’ll probably be staying down here a little longer, so don’t expect me home until 7 September at least.
P.S. Thanks a lot for the loan. I’ll pay it back as soon as I can, but it will be a few months until my bank account will be full enough to make me confident. If you need it, though, I can pay back one hundred any time, + maybe two or three hundred next month, + still get by.
It’s still true that moving into a new place required first and last month’s rent, and a security deposit, so even when the rent was that low it was a difficult financial decision to make the move. Fortunately, I had parents who could loan me a few hundred dollars to get set up. Yes, I paid them back over the next 6 months or so.
I salvaged a few letters like that, just because it was mind-blowing to remember what it was like to be 22 years old again.
We have committed to a real estate agent. He thinks my mother’s house will be on the market within a few weeks.
I signed up a cleaning service who will sweep in on Wednesday, and reduce all the rooms to bare walls.
All bank accounts closed.
Hey, remember, I’m a college professor teaching a couple of courses? I got a lot of grading done today, too.
Now I get to go home. My flight leaves at 8am, so I’ve got to be out of here at 5. My flight is nonstop, but once I get to MSP I’ll have to wait a few hours for a shuttle, then sit in a van for longer than I was on the flight. I won’t be home until midnight.
I might just sleep all day on Sunday.
AiG has demanded that I take down this post, so I have.
Jonathan Chait (fuck that guy) uses a familiar tactic to argue that Democrats should throw trans people under the bus. He points out How Progressive Overreach Gave Trump His Favorite Attack Ad, and argues that we should back off on policies that the Republicans don’t like. He wants to use Republican hate ads as a guide to how we ought to present our principles. Trump is currently using all kinds of divisive hate ads to stir up support, and we ought to avoid advocating for the kinds of things that make Trump and his followers angry.
The Trump ad describes an answer Harris gave on an ACLU candidate questionnaire five years ago. (“As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?” Answer: yes.). I’m sure neither the ACLU nor the Harris staffers who cooperated in this response set out to seed Republican attack ads. Yet a large portion of the work of the progressive nonprofit complex is functionally dedicated to this very outcome. And these kinds of perverse outcomes will continue to occur unless Democrats get wise to the dynamic that continues to produce them.
So reasonable. We need to woo the bigots, so stop alienating the people who hate trans people. Stop standing up for the rights of an oppressed minority because it annoys an oppressive majority. Be more conservative, as if the Democratic party weren’t already a center-right party as it were.
But watch Chait run away from his position: oh my, he’s in favor of trans rights, as long as he isn’t expected to allow them any rights.
The point I’m making here is purely political. I have no moral problem with prisons giving properly run transition care to prisoners who wish to change their sex. I’d also agree that Trump is exploiting the issue in a way designed to spread hatred against all transgender people, rather than to question one small program. (It is so small, indeed, that it went on throughout Trump’s presidency without Trump noticing or caring.) The issue is that political candidates need to think practically about the existing electorate, and the progressive movement is currently designed to ignore pragmatism.
Trump is “exploiting the issue in a way designed to spread hatred against all transgender people,” but don’t you dare support that issue. That’s not pragmatic. It might be a life-or-death issue for trans people, but maybe the Democrats ought to pragmatically allow them to die? For a few more votes from people who want them to suffer and die?
It’s not just trans rights. Chait is unhappy because absolutists on a whole host of issues don’t like the compromises he is willing to make, and oh boy, but Chait is eager to write criticisms of trans people and unions and climate activists, he’d sure like them to sit down and shut up, all in the name of pragmatism.
The groups in the coalition increasingly tend to define agreement with their cause in maximal terms. If you support equality and respect for trans people, but question, say, medicalizing young people, you’re anti-trans. If you support labor unions but oppose some positions they advocate, you’re a scab. Climate activists increasingly use the term “climate denier,” once reserved for those who refuse to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming, for any skeptic of any element of their preferred remedies. The rampant absolutism makes it difficult to acknowledge even the possibility that there are political risks attached to going too far in agreement with the movement.
Only an idiot would refuse to recognize that taking new, bold positions is going to involve political risks. That’s the whole point! You’ll never make any progress if you only support the “safe” position.
I don’t think Chait’s position is pragmatic at all. I call it chickenshittery.
Hey, Jonathan, rather than always complaining about sane, moderate, humane positions that a politician takes on trans issues, why aren’t you focusing on the mad, cruel, pointless bigotries that their opponents trumpet loudly? Do you think that hating gay and trans people, or union-busting, or ignoring climate change are pragmatic policies that we ought to let stand, quietly?
Buk buk buk buKAW.
