A sad anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death. I love that guy’s music, and I’m going to be playing his music nonstop today.

This one tells me he really was a Minnesotan.

My favorite, though, is Raspberry Beret. That one takes me back to being 19 and taking my girl on drives through farm country — not in Minnesota, but the music is universal. I was a fan before I moved to this state!

Lately, I’ve been setting summertime goals for myself. I know I’m probably going to be laid up with knee surgery for a while (I hope I can get these wobbly aching knees fixed!), and I’m going to get through it with some dreams. One is to get up to the Boundary Waters before the Republicans destroy them, and go spidering in the woods. Another is to visit Paisley Park. I’ve driven by it many times, this summer I’m going to get off the damn freeway and take the tour.

Mother of spiders!

Show me a 500 million year old chelicerate, and I’ll be happy for a day. Look at this beauty, Megachelicerax cousteaui, excavated from a Utah fossil bed.

Anatomic reconstructions of the dorsal (left) and ventral (right) morphologies. b, Artistic reconstructions by M. Hattori illustrating oblique views of the dorsal (top) and ventral (bottom) morphologies. The sanctacaridid-like morphology of the posteriormost body region is speculative. gi, gill (that is, a set of gill lamellae); te, telson.

Pretty cool, right? The best part of it is that pair of appendages at the very front of the animal — those are chelicerae, the biting/chomping/chewing/venom-injecting bits of a modern spider, that make them distinct from insects, which only have antennae at that end. That makes this the oldest known chelicerate ever discovered. It was a swimming marine animal, and doesn’t have the legs we associate with spiders — chelicerae evolved first, legs much later.

Also, this isn’t just the mother of spiders, but is also the mother of a huge family of cousins: horseshoe crabs, eurypterids, as well as spiders.

Megachelicerax documents the oldest stratigraphic occurrence of chelicerae (that is, uniramous, unichelate deutocerebral appendages) and bridges the simple body and limb organization of Cambrian megacheirans with the more derived anatomy of post-Cambrian synziphosurines and crown-group chelicerates. a, Simplified consensus topology based on Bayesian analysis (Mk model, 4 chains, 5,000,000 generations, 1/1,000 sampling resulting in 5,000 samples with 25% burn-in resulting in 3,750 samples retained); detailed results and comparison with parsimony provided in Extended Data Fig. 6. The numbers in parentheses correspond to the total number of podomeres and the number of chelae, respectively, present in the deutocerebral appendage. Taxa whose names are in bold font are illustrated in b–l. b–l, The morphology of the anterior body region in select taxa. b, Fuxianhuiid Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis (Cambrian, Stage 3). c, Artiopod Olenoides serratus (Cambrian, Wuliuan). d, Megacheiran Yohoia tenuis (Cambrian, Wuliuan). e, Megacheiran Haikoucaris ercaensis (Cambrian, Stage 3). f, Megacheiran Leanchoilia superlata (Cambrian, Wuliuan). g, Mollisoniid M. plenovenatrix (Cambrian, Wuliuan). h, Habeliid Habelia optata (Cambrian, Wuliuan). i, M. cousteaui (Cambrian, Drumian). j, Synziphosurine Dibasterium durgae (Silurian, Wenlock). k, Xiphosurid Limulus polyphemus (recent). l, Eurypterid Slimonia acuminata (Silurian, Llandovery–Wenlock).

That is one wildly successful tree. It just goes to show that you can go on to do great things even if your face looks like a nest of spiky clawed jointed tentacles.

Rudy Lerosey-Aubril, Javier Ortega-Hernández. A chelicera-bearing arthropod reveals the Cambrian origin of chelicerates. Nature, 2026; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10284-2

Texas FAFO

Someone on TikTok pointed out there are more kids in Texas with measles than trans college athletes in all of America.
Guess which they want you focused on?

Texas has been playing games with their universities.

Earlier this month, Texas Tech chancellor Brandon Creighton announced plans to close all gender and sexuality programs across the system and prohibit graduate students from researching the topics. Texas A&M similarly closed its women’s and gender studies program in January. The University of Texas ordered faculty in February to refrain from teaching ill-defined “controversial” topics in class. Nearly all Texas public university systems have conducted some kind of course-review process that screens instructional materials for gender and sexuality content.

This means weird conservative administrators with no relevant experience are meddling in the content of courses…courses they would not be qualified to teach, but hey, they’ve got rubber stamps and spreadsheets, that’s all the power they need. They’re now discovering the consequences.

Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content. Peterson’s colleague Linda Raznik, a philosophy professor and associate department head, is jumping ship with similar concerns about academic freedom. Lucy Schiller, a nonfiction writing professor at Texas Tech University, also has plans to leave her job.

They are just a few of the faculty members giving up their jobs at Texas public institutions as the systems deploy escalating censorship policies that restrict or explicitly ban any instruction, writing, research or discussion on gender identity and sexual orientation.

It’s almost as if they intend to demolish all of Texas higher education. Fortunately, I am no longer in the market for a job, because I wouldn’t ever consider working as an academic in Texas. I also wouldn’t encourage any students to enroll in a Texas school anymore — you don’t know where your university will be in a few years.

Texans deserve better.

“Viewpoint diversity” is a misleading way to say “conservative welfare”

Viewpoint diversity is how you get the unqualified wife of a corrupt wrestling promoter put in charge of the department of education

Harvard is suddenly more concerned with campus diversity, but specifically diversity that benefits wealthy conservatives. They’ve started a campaign asking for ten million dollar endowments.

The effort comes in response to longstanding criticism that Harvard’s faculty leans overwhelmingly liberal. Those concerns intensified last year, when U.S. President Donald Trump elevated the issue as part of a broader pressure campaign against the University.

In the now-infamous April 2025 letter, federal officials called for an audit of Harvard’s faculty to assess “viewpoint diversity” and demanded it hire a “critical mass” of new professors in departments deemed lacking. Garber rejected the Trump administration’s ultimatum, but the scrutiny has persisted.

This is nuts. Asking people to donate millions of dollars is not going to enhance diversity — that is a campaign that is only going to draw on a donor population that is going to be biased to favor extreme wealth, and is going to be populated with conservative, entitled people. Harvard is basically inviting people to buy professors to fill their faculty, at the urging of Donald Trump.

Making it even worse, they plan to set up these faculty in a special category that will be hired by the university, with 20 or 30 professors who will be selected for “viewpoint”, rather than their qualifications in their field, and that they will then be inserted into departments that don’t have the political perspective the administration desires.

I’m at a small university, and I find it hard to imagine an administration so flush that they can declare they’re going to hire a swarm of new people. But imagine if my U announced that they were hiring one or two people based on their political bias, and then they decide that there were too many people in the biology discipline who were Democrats, so we would get those new faculty without regard for the academic/curricular needs of our biology program.

Every college department can use more faculty, and offering us new hires would be wonderful, but WE know what our specific discipline needs to implement our curriculum, while the administration generally has only the vaguest of clues, and what they do know is what we tell them. I think the faculty would be horrified if we were suddenly saddled with a new face whose primary qualification is that they are Republican. This is a violation of the principle that we do not hire people on the basis of aspects of their life that are irrelevant to doing their job. We are specifically instructed that we can’t ask job candidates about their politics, their religion, their sexuality, their marital status, and on and on. “Viewpoint diversity” explicitly violates a policy implemented to remove bias from the hiring process.

It is true that that has led to more liberal viewpoints filling our ranks, but that’s because reality has a well-known liberal bias. One of the hallmarks of the conservative perspective is that it tries to deny reality in favor of prior preconceptions, and resist change. Maybe we shouldn’t put representatives of a political philosophy that despises education into the professoriate, did you ever consider that, Harvard?

Screaming for joy?

I can relate to this National Park Service message.

Our favorite part of spring is walking into spider webs and screaming every time. What’s yours?

I wish. I haven’t seen any webs yet, although I have spotted some individual strands of silk. Warm weather is coming, though!

My poor spiders

I’m up early, I look out the window, and what do I see? Snow.

It has been warm and pleasant, except for the last few days, which have been chilly and windy. I was starting to see spiders around the yard again, but now — they’re probably huddled deep in crevices and whatever shelter they can find, waiting out this doggedly persistent winter.

They won’t have long to wait. The forecast is for 31°C on Wednesday.

We need better Supreme Court justices

Well, this is a fine how-de-do. Clarence Thomas is arguing for theocracy.

Thomas, 77, the Court’s longest-serving conservative member, laid the blame at the feet of intellectuals and the nation’s colleges and universities, which he said have allowed founding values to fall out of favor. He did not reference specific political figures or contemporary events.

He also did not reference specific values, but only platitudes. He simply took the time to condemn intellectuals, colleges, and universities — I guess he was corrupted by his time spent getting a JD from Yale.

Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government, Thomas said. [It] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.

Hang on there, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, do I need to explain to you that our form of government was specified by the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence? That document was a dramatic announcement of our grievances and intent to sever our subservience with a colonial power, England. The Declaration does have some wording about “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, but it is otherwise a secular document focused on civil complaints and disagreements with a government. Officials do not swear to uphold the Declaration of Independence, which would be a weird thing to do, since a list of 18th century grievances is not relevant to a 21st century state.

It’s our Constitution you should care about. You know, the document that starts out

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

You know, the document that says our government comes from the people. Not god. It doesn’t even mention god or religion except in the first amendment, where it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” But now a Supreme Court Justice has decided that no, our rights come from a god, on the basis of reading the wrong document? And by ignoring entirely a wholly secular document that is the actual source of any authority he might have?

“Progressivism,” whatever that means in his decrepit brain, does not require subservience and weakness, nor is it dependent on a transcendent origin of our rights. Some of the founding fathers he reveres weren’t particularly religious and didn’t need a clerical excuse to see a reason for establishing a government. You can be an atheist and support the Constitution!

Thomas also took aim at officials in Washington, he said, who lack commitment to righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.

Yes, do take aim at government officials. I don’t think Donald Trump is at all pious, and is more committed to corruption than to free enterprise or righteousness, and he’s filled the upper levels of government with selfish hacks like himself. He’s also appointed several of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s peers. Any complaints should be rightfully directed at the institution he represents.

And hey, does taking bribes from wealthy conservatives count as a righteous cause?

Fuck your traditional morality, Clarence. It’s more like a traditional venality.

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Yesterday, I said I was looking for reasons to tamp down excessive cheerfulness. No such assistance needed this morning!

Louisiana has taken care of it.

Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives took the dangerous step of voting in favor of a truly disgusting anti-homeless bill. This bill is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation peddled by the Palantir-funded, billionaire-backed Cicero Institute. In addition to making it a crime to sleep outside, this bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment.

But it gets worse.

This bill requires homeless people to pay for the very treatment they are forced into. And if the person cannot pay the cost of treatment, this bill requires them to perform unpaid labor for the government or a community organization to pay off their debt. Louisiana has a long history – and present – of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.

It’s a very 19th century approach to dealing with a social problem.

Humans are awful creatures

I learned about this horror from Greta Christina: there are networks of websites that host videos of men raping their partners. These sickos drug women without their knowledge, record themselves assaulting these unconscious women, do live video streams where they take suggestions on what to do to them, and thousands of men log in for the thrill of watching rape.

While the platforms vary, inside such groups, video is king. Some users advertised livestreams, showing the abuse of drugged women in real time, for $20 per viewer, with cryptocurrency the preferred means of payment.

Of course, these are human beings being abused for the entertainment of strangers, but sometimes they get even.

When Zoe Watts learned that her husband of 16 years had been crushing her son’s sleeping medicine into her tea and raping her while she was passed out, it shattered her world.

“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street, or who’s even friending us on Facebook. You know, we worry about going to our car late at night in a car park, but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to,” Watts said.

Her then husband’s confession came on an otherwise ordinary Sunday in 2018, after the couple – who share four children – had returned from church.

“He reeled off a list of his wrongdoings… as if it was, you know, a shopping list,” Watts said, speaking to CNN at her house in Devon, England.

He told her the abuse had been going on for years.

Telling her after church was a nice touch. Her response was appropriate: she turned him in to the police, all the evidence was right there on video, and he is currently serving an 11 year prison sentence.

Good.

Now let’s get all the other participants in this criminal activity — these sites had 62 million visits — arrested, and shut down all these facilitating web sites.