Wow, Quantum Eraser was even worse than I imagined

Time for another Bad Science Sunday, and this time I followed up on the threat of a video by some gomer calling himself Quantum Eraser. I “watched” it. It was unwatchable. It’s basically a braying ass shouting “logical error” at every statement about scientific evidence, without following through and stating what the error was, or even addressing the evidence in any way. So I made a video, and along the way I bomb you with my opinions about science communication, because this guy was basically the antithesis of good teaching.

Oh, yeah, I also sorta kinda included a partial script, below the fold.

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The morning nothing went right

Today I decided to get out and do a little photography, and my target was the Frank Schott stone barn, about a half hour’s drive away from me, near Chokio, Minnesota. It’s an impressive construction — Schott went all out to build this rock solid cement and stone barn (and chicken coop!) back in the 1920s, finishing it in 1932. It was abandoned in the 1970s, and the wooden roof collapsed in the 1990s, but the structure itself is still standing. It’s an abandoned building that is so well built it feels totally safe to clamber around in it.

So we set off this morning. It looked easy to get to: a straight shot down highway 28 to county road 19, then left about 2 miles. No problem! Except there was no county road 19 that we could find, and we overshot and then backtracked and looked everywhere. Eventually, on pure dumb intuition — “this little gravel road feels like it’s about the right distance” — we found it.

I whipped out my nice camera, thinking the early morning light was perfect, and turned it on…nothing. What? Then I remembered — the night before, I’d prepared for the trip by getting the camera batteries charged up. The batteries were still sitting there at home, 100% charged. D’oh! At least I’d remembered the memory card.

I’d brought my drone along, too, but the wind was savage this morning, so nope, none of that, either.

I took a few photos with my cell phone. I should have taken a few selfies of myself kicking myself.

Maybe I’ll try again another day. It’s not that far away.

Why you gotta do me like this, Anthony?

I go many long months without ever thinking of Michael Voris and his fanatical contingent of radical Catholics, but then a long-time reader has to fill me in on what he’s been up to, and I watch another of his videos. Voris is getting crazier and more extremist all the time. He’s a one-issue religious loon, and that issue is abortion. He claims that racism, nuclear war, the death penalty…none of these add up to a body count like abortion, not even close and that abortion is the great evil all the way back to the apostles — really? The Bible doesn’t make much of a big deal about it — and that Catholics who oppose the death penalty, for instance, are wasting their time because the Bible is fine with executing criminals (like, you know, the big guy who gets murdered on a cross at the start of the New Testament?). He’s a Catholic who despises the Catholicism of the church and the Pope and all that.

He also despises the Democrats, the Party of Death, who are all Marxists, and is horrified that a whole quarter of US bishops are registered Democrats. Joe Biden? Marxist? That alone should make you realize we’re not listening to a guy playing with a whole deck. No, according to Voris, he’s not happy with a Catholic being elected to the presidency, because Biden is actually a heretical gay-marrying child-killer. You see,

Biden and his party are evil, full stop. No Catholic, especially a member of the clergy, should be vague about this evil in the slightest. But if Biden captures the Catholic vote and goes on to win the White House, no doubt the champagne corks will be popping all over bishopland, but their partying will be short-lived. Marxists always kill those who got them to power. Regardless of how loyal they might have been on the path to power, thinking they would somehow be rewarded, their reward will be the wrong end of a gun barrel.

So get ready, everyone, Joe Biden is going to dispatch commie death squads to slaughter the Catholic church hierarchy.

I guess we do need to keep an eye on the fringe Catholics, who are taking paranoia to whole new levels.

If I may make a safe prediction: the churches, all of them, including the Catholic church, will do just fine under a Democratic government. They always do. Biden won’t lift a finger to support the separation of church and state.

Well, that was strange

I was in the lab, feeding the baby spiders, when I discovered something peculiar. I popped to tops on the spider vials, and they were fine, all placid and polite and saying “please” and “thank you” and just being all around delightful boys and girls, like always.

Then I gathered up a bunch of flies, and they were freaked out and hyper. Usually I can rely on them to scurry to the edge of the container, where I flick them one by one to the spiders. Not today! They were rushing about, charging the opening, and leaping to their doom by themselves, which was bad, because flies are stupid, and without my assist they often miss the open vials. It also made it difficult to control how many flies went to each spider, so some are feasting well, others got their usual fare, and more flies than usual ended up running off to feed the feral spiders living in my lab.

It was as if they’d heard that their Lord had become a crappy one term president, and they’d all decided to run in circles, scream and shout. They all still ended up juice in the guts of a spider, and eventually multicolored poop spots on the floor of a cage.

Which reminds me, I’ve got a major lab cleanup ahead of me, which I’m not going to have time to do until the semester is over. I hope the flies settle down and resign themselves to their fate by then.

Finally

Now we need to get to work and push that lackluster centrist dork leftward to get essential changes made. No complacency allowed!

I hear Trump left the White House this morning to go golfing. He should probably cut that short and start making plans to flee the country. He might be welcome in Russia, although I hear they don’t much care for failures. North Korea?

End it. End it now

Every morning now I get up and check the election returns, groan in disgust, and never look again until the next day. The first day or two, yes, it was ambiguous, the counts were incomplete, it was a close contest and it’s fair to avoid calling it for one or the other. That’s not the case anymore, though — the ineluctability of the math means it’s clear that Biden wins Pennsylvania, tacking 20 electoral college votes onto the 253 he already has, pushing him over the 270 vote threshold and making him the president-elect.

However, the television networks, which have somehow become the final arbiter of our electoral process, have been reluctant to declare an end to the four antic years of the reality TV presidency. Maybe they fear losing my once-a-day click on their news sites (because they will; I never want to hear from CNN or FoxNews ever again). Even the newspapers seem to regret that Trump’s chances are “fading”.

I know my country is afraid of math, but it’s kind of unavoidable when you’re tallying up the votes of a few hundred million people. Accept it. Only now are the news media, cowards that they are, beginning to question the wisdom of airing Trump’s lies. Hey, maybe post-election, Twitter will finally attain a spine sufficiently rigid to finally ban Trump’s racist ass, as they finally did Bannon.

Also, while I’m speaking of math and counting the hordes, I’m tired of the claim that Pennsylvania is going to win this for the Biden/Harris camp. It is only a quirk of the timing of the count and variations in election law that mean Pennsylvania might carry this one across the finish line — the whole country had to struggle and work together to barely eject the fascist/racist slug.

Another reason to end it now: the Republican cheaters are working hard to call any results into question. A couple of QAnon supporters were caught trying to smuggle a truckload of fake ballots into Philadelphia. You know they were going to try to blame the Democrats for ballot fraud, it’s just that they were caught doing it first.

Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center were “coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots” to the city, CNN affiliate KYW reported, citing prosecutors.

The center is one of the places where election workers have been counting votes from the 2020 general election, which includes the race for president.

Text messages reveal that the men were concerned about the tallying of votes at the convention center, prosecutors said, according to KYW.

Right. Because bringing fake ballots to the election center is exactly the thing to alleviate people’s concerns.

Both men were carrying loaded handguns, and police found an AR-type rifle in the Hummer, authorities said at a news conference Friday. About 160 rounds of ammunition were found in the weapons and the vehicle, authorities said.

We need to end this election farce because at some point we’re going to have to confront the seditious armed militias and conspiracy theorists who have rallied behind the worst president ever.

Behold! Light box Mk II!

Last week, Ade & I “built” (I use the word loosely) a space cocoon out of aluminum foil to control the illumination of our experimental spiders. It worked, clumsily, and it looked hideous.


Today, we took a Great Leap Forward and advanced the cause of Spider Containment and Illumination technology by building Light Box Mk II. It is beautiful and elegant.

We constructed it with frame of Space Age™ PVC pipe, covered with sheets of Cutting Edge™ Black FoamCore, the edges sealed with Advanced Technology™ adhesive backed metallic fabric…in other words, cardboard and duct tape. It looks damned fine, though. We’ve got a spider in a cage beneath a NoIR camera in there, and Ade is caught in the act of activating our time-lapse software on the Raspberry Pi so we can quantify it’s behavior night and day. Our sole obstacle to doing Great Science is now the spider: our Mk I may have been clumsy, but it did work, and unfortunately this particular spider cowered out of sight* almost the whole time the computer eye in the sky was staring down at her. We’re doing another trial run now.

Another bonus is that we made the box fairly roomy, and we could eventually put 3 or 4 spiders in separate cages in there. We only have the one camera right now, though, so that will have to wait.

*Of course, a spider refusing to behave is still data in a behavioral observation, so that was fine.

Almost tempted

I hear distant echoes of a possible Biden/Harris victory, but I refuse to believe it until the hammer drops and the evil orange turd is declared a loser, and fired. Until then, I’ll just read The Rude Pundit’s take.

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump’s appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was “Suffer, motherfucker.” If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I’ll take it.

I’m almost tempted to tune into the preznit’s Twitter feed or to watch one of his press appearances just to see the meltdown in progress, but I shall resist. Get him out first, then let’s sweep out the rest of the slime.

But I’m not celebrating yet. I’ve witnessed too many years of Republican ratfucking.

Spiders!

It kills me that every time I see a splendid spider photo, I can’t share it here — too many people are freaked out by arachnophobia. I wish I could cure it by constantly rubbing more spiders in your faces, but I know that doesn’t work, so I’ll just gently point you in the direction of a couple of collections of gorgeous spiders, and you can choose to go look, if you want.

The Great Fox Spider has been rediscovered in Britain! These are related to wolf spiders, so you probably know what they look like, but it has the most wonderful mottled markings. I know some people are fans of the more garishly colorful spiders, like peacock jumpers, but I’ve come to appreciate the subtlety of the more variable and muted markings, like the ones I see on Parasteatoda. If you must do something bold, go for something simple and clean, like the distinctive swoosh on Steatoda borealis.

You want more variety? Check out Science Friday’s collection of spider photos. My favorite there is the Pirate Spider — there’s something about a gracile spider with delicate line art on its body and long bristling spikes on its legs that I find appealing. But if you’re into big bearish brute mygalomorphs, get an eyeful of that black purse-web spider with its massive chelicerae.

One more photo I wish I had: yesterday, Mary spotted a tiny juvenile cellar spider descending on a strand of silk, and she brought it to me (I’m desperate to see more live spiders, it’s gotten too cold for them). I tried to catch it by snaring its thread, but it got away fast before I could get my camera ready. We think it landed on my pants. So while I didn’t get a picture, I’ve got that going for me, that maybe a baby spider has taken up residency in my clothing. It’s too bad I’m not going to be able to do laundry, ever.

Man, it’d be easier to be a popular blogger if I had an obsession with cats.