AAS Meeting starts Thursday!

Maybe I’m the only one enthused by it all, but the 2020 American Arachnology Society Virtual Summer Symposium starts the day after tomorrow. Online admission is only $10 if you want to see it! A quick summary of the schedule:

  • Thursday evening is a keynote recognizing the contributions of Norm Platnick.
  • Friday is a Discussion: Impacts of Racism on Recruitment and Retention of Black Arachnologists. Every scientific society is finally trying to pay attention to this issue.
  • Saturday, we have a workshop on using iNaturalist for science and outreach.
  • Sunday is the online poster session.
  • Monday looks like wall-to-wall 15 minute presentations.

A jolly time will be held by all. It’s more spread out than the usual in-person scientific meeting, which means, I hope, it will be low-stress and a little less exhausting than the usual affair.

Scouting out potential field sites

This is just a brief update on my summer research. I’ve mentioned before that I’m more of a bench scientist kind of guy, but that’s changing to some degree. Part of it is this COVID-19 pandemic, which is limiting lab access and forcing me to spend more time in alternate activities. A larger part is that last year I switched from zebrafish work, which was entirely an indoor activity with an inbred species, to looking at spiders, which are immensely diverse and more complicated – they don’t all live in nice air-conditioned buildings.

So last year I’d also begun a project where I surveyed spider populations in people’s garages and sheds – it was convenient for a newbie arachnologist, because it narrowed the environments and limited the number of different species I had to identify. But that project is also on hold this year, because knocking on people’s doors and asking them to let you survey their living spaces is a bad idea during a pandemic. Instead, I saw this as an opportunity to spread my wings and get familiar with more spiders and more environments, and an excuse to move out of garages and out into the wide world.

Yeah, I moved all the way from a lab to a garage…baby steps, you know. This summer I decided to go off and challenge myself with more complex spaces. This involves going to places that aren’t full of houses, that aren’t occupied by lots of people, and that may involve walking off into the brush and finding inconvenient spots with relatively undisturbed habitat.

One of the tools I’ve started using is a drone to scout out locations. I’m lazy; if I see some tantalizing bit of habitat well off the road in the distance, it’s nice to be able to send a drone out to see how navigable the path looks and whether it looks as interesting closeup as it does from a kilometer away, without having to actually walk there.

I’m using a Mavic Mini, which is wonderfully easy and convenient. It’s tiny, so I can actually stuff it in my camera bag and carry it with me, and it’s easy to fly so the basic things I want to do with it aren’t an obstacle. It’s fun to fly, but I didn’t want to get sucked into a vortex of struggling to learn how to use it. Lazy, remember? If this gadget were complex, at some point I’d decide it was easier to just leg it through the brush.

Not a problem. This thing is so easy that any idiot can use it to make a quick scan of a kilometer of ground.

What am I looking for? What am I not looking for is an easier question. I’m avoiding agricultural areas, which scratches off 90+% of the terrain around here, and I’m shunning, mostly, parks that have been groomed and are full of people, and although we have a lot of lakes, the larger ones tend to be surrounded with lake cabins and are privately owned. I want something abandoned or as near to wild Minnesota as I can get, but I also want it accessible (but not too accessible). I’ve been going over maps, and found a few promising places.

There are several state wildlife management areas near me. These are patches of land set aside for non-agricultural use – the intent is that they are a kind of reserve where local wildlife can thrive undisturbed. The primary motivation seems to be to shelter ducks and deer for a while, so they can be shot later, but at least no one is intentionally culling the local spiders. So yesterday we took a spin and visited a few of them.

The first spot we visited was perfect. This was the Dolven State Wildlife Management Area, and it spoiled me. I didn’t need the drone at all; there was a nicely groomed parking area with a bench, and right across the road was a beautiful messy environment, perfect for spiders. I buzzed the place anyway. This location was in a loop of the Pomme de Terre river, there was a bit of wetland enclosed in the river and another stretch of woods right next door. No hiking required!

A river, grassy patches, and a cluttered wood right there, so I could just plunk myself down in one spot and have a grand time puzzling out the spider population. It’s also only 6 minutes from my house. Very convenient!

The second spot…less convenient. Only a little further, a whole 9 minutes away, but the Klason State Wildlife Management Area was less diverse and less accessible. There’s a deeply rutted unmaintained road that parallels it, complete with spots that were mud wallows and that we weren’t going to even try to cross in our little Honda Fit.

A quick survey with the drone revealed that there was little point in exploring deeper, since it was the same flat scrubby grassland all along its length, and we could just pick any point we could reach and sample it there.

The third place we checked out was lovely. It’s the office of our local Wetland Management District, which has a driving path and footpaths. While it has groomed paths and gets a little tourist traffic (this is Morris, so not a lot of that), it is a wildlife refuge with prairie grasslands, marshes, ponds, and wooded areas, and it sprawls out over a lot of area. The drone was useful here for checking out some sites that were off the trails, and that have some real potential for being places where spiders lurk, although, truth be told, spiders lurk everywhere.

What’s next? There are a few more places I want to survey, mainly some local spots that are neglected and full of regrowth, and I’d also like to toss an abandoned farm with decaying buildings into the mix – spiders love a good ol’ abandoned barn. Then it’s time for the hard work, plunking myself down for a few hours in the early morning or late evening, using a sweep net, gathering spider samples and then sitting down and staring at taxonomic keys trying to figure out who they are.

Also, I’ve got a few vats of permethrin and picaridin on order. Part of the joy of getting out of the lab and into the field is discovering how much ticks love us. We were plucking them off us all evening yesterday, and even now I’ve got the creepy crawlies as I imagine more of the ugly cousins of the arachnids I like crawling over me.

Dreaming about mushrooms all night long

Yesterday, for dinner, we had mushrooms. I like mushrooms, and growing up my father was into gathering chanterelles in the cathedral-like forests of the Pacific Northwest, but I’d always sort of taken them for granted and put little thought into using them in our meals. But yesterday, on a whim, I decided to try portobello caps as yet another meat substitute, and I was blown away. I ended up having dreams about more mushrooms, which may be a weird sign that the fungus is taking over my brain.

Anyway, they were perfect, savory and with a light texture, and it’s more likely that they just tasted so darned good rather than that hyphae are infiltrating my brain stem. My recipe is easy: get some big ol’ portobello caps, put them lamellae side up on a baking sheet, and pour in a mixture of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and garlic. Let ’em soak for a half hour, then bake at 450°F for half an hour. For the last 5 minutes of that, add some shredded cheese, let it get all melty, and serve directly from the oven.

Wow. It was so good. I limit my trips to the grocery store (Remember? COVID-19? It’s not over) which means I can’t go again until next weekend, but I’m definitely stocking up on more mushrooms next time.

Is no statue safe anymore?

Nope. Even being a president on Mt Rushmore makes you safe.

The statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the AMNH is coming down.

The New York Times reports that it was the museum’s decision to remove the statue, which has sat at its main entrance for the last 80 years; the city agreed it was time to take it down. Though the statue intends to honor Roosevelt—New York’s former governor, a U.S. President, and a famed naturalist whose father was one of the museum’s founders—it also depicts colonialism, as evidenced by the stereotypical Native American man and African man who flank the horseback-riding white man at its center. In 2017, activists splashed blood-red paint on its base, noting that the statue “is bloody at its very foundation.” And with reignited nationwide conversations about and removals of statues depicting Confederate generals, slaveholders, and genocidal explorers, the museum decided it was time to revisit Roosevelt.

Maybe we should look at every monument and ask exactly what it is commemorating. A monument that celebrates the national park system, yes. A monument that celebrates one guy riding gallantly above exploited peoples, no.

The spectacle of Republican cannibalism is always entertaining

Ah, the country is swirling down the crapper thanks to toxic conservatives, but at least we can savor the desperate clawing of the terrible people responsible at each other. I give you the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, which is mightily enraged at a recent Supreme Court decision that says employers can’t punish people for being gay.

I and others have been shouting from our virtual rooftops for over a decade that there is no greater threat to First Amendment protections than that posed by the subversive “LGBTQ” movement. Can conservatives not yet see the end of the short pier toward which GOP leaders have long been pushing them? Really?

(Im)moderate Republicans, Libertarian-leaning Republicans, Republicans with dollar signs rather than Scripture reflected in their myopic eyes have been pushing conservatives toward the end of the short pier, hoping that either spines will crumble or conservatives will tumble into the dark waters. Supremacist Court Justice/lawmaker Neil-the-Usurper-Gorsuch just gave conservatives a huge shove toward the watery abyss.

Also, there are gays in the Republican party!

Conservatives get all giddy with chills running up their legs when homosexuals like Guy Benson, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Brandon Straka express Republican-ish views. “Oh gosh, the cool kids like us, they really like us!”

Meanwhile, those smart, articulate, good-looking homosexuals seek to change the Republican Party from within—like a cancer or a Guinea worm (am I allowed to call it the Guinea worm any longer?). We welcome camels into the tent at our peril.

The author suggests that all these Republicans ought to join the Democratic party. No, thanks, they’re awful people, and we are already full up on them. You keep ’em.

Could people please stop reducing evolutionary phenomena to single, all-encompassing causes? Like, now?

Imagine you are a computer scientist and engineer, and you design a simulation that consists of a 15×15 square grid, with a ‘predator’ who follows some simple rules to seek out ‘prey’. You put most of your effort into designing the simulated ‘prey’ who uses visual detection, as well as some interesting uses of memory to simulate planning, to avoid the predator, and then you randomize the grid with various densities of black squares that block vision and white squares that allow line-of-sight to the predator. You work out some general principles for controlling the ‘prey’ simulation, for instance that less cluttered grids select for ‘prey’ that do more careful planning and have more complex rules for behavior.

I think that’s an interesting result, especially since they quantify everything. But is it enough to get a big splashy publication in Nature? To get noticed in the popular news media? Nah, probably not. It’s narrow niche research, but no one outside computer science is going to be impressed. So, how to spice it up?

I know! Claim that your simulation is significant evidence that explains the Cambrian explosion, the diversification of terrestrial vertebrates, and the evolution of human intelligence! That’s the ticket!

After explaining how their simulation works, the authors get down to explaining why their result is important. Apparently, it’s not because they’ve done anything interesting in computer science, so they need to borrow from biology to find a justification.

Parker has suggested that the origin of the Cambrian explosion lies in the atmosphere or oceans of the period gaining higher transparency to sunlight, triggering the evolution of the first image-forming eye and sparking a predator–prey evolutionary arms race that gave rise to the Cambrian’s profusion of animal forms. A second great change in transparency occurred with the emergence of fish on to land, which gave rise to a sensorium large enough to fit multiple futures. Our idealized model of spatial planning during predator–prey interactions suggests that there may be a link between the enlarged visual sensorium and habitat complexity of terrestrial animals and the evolution of neural circuits for dynamic planning.

They get even more hyperbolic when talking to reporters on CNN (see, it was a smart decision to add all that evolution stuff — it got the attention of the media).

The ways our ancestors adapted to live in patchy landscapes cluttered with obstacles “poured jet fuel” on the evolution of the brains of animals and early human ancestors, according to researchers at Northwestern University.

The combination of our enhanced eyesight and higher intelligence to survive in this complex land environment is “why we can go out for seafood, but seafood can’t go out for us,” said Malcolm MacIver, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering in Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering.

Kind of a grand leap from a simulation on a checkerboard to an elaborate umbrella hypothesis that explains a complex and diverse evolutionary phenomenon as the the product of being able to see farther, isn’t it? I would have rejected this paper at the first sentence of the abstract, which tells me they’re not very knowledgeable about the biology they’re using as a prop.

It is uncontroversial that land animals have more elaborated cognitive abilities than their aquatic counterparts such as fish. Yet there is no apparent a-priori reason for this. A key cognitive faculty is planning. We show that in visually guided predator-prey interactions, planning provides a significant advantage, but only on land. During animal evolution, the water-to-land transition resulted in a massive increase in visual range. Simulations of behavior identify a specific type of terrestrial habitat, clustered open and closed areas (savanna-like), where the advantage of planning peaks. Our computational experiments demonstrate how this patchy terrestrial structure, in combination with enhanced visual range, can reveal and hide agents as a function of their movement and create a selective benefit for imagining, evaluating, and selecting among possible future scenarios—in short, for planning. The vertebrate invasion of land may have been an important step in their cognitive evolution.

It is “uncontroversial”? To whom? Which is “smarter”, a spider or an octopus? Why are you lumping the diversity of terrestrial animals into a neat tidy bin labeled “land animals” and making the assumption that they have more elaborate cognitive abilities than the wet creatures you’ve thrown into a bin labeled “aquatic animals”? If your hypothesis were sufficient to explain major evolutionary transitions, why is it that cetacean brains got larger as they adapted to an environment with reduced visual range? Why do you need a single a priori reason to explain the origin of complex phenomena with widely varying solutions? Why is it that the mantis shrimp, the animal with the most sophisticated visual sensorium, is neither particularly brainy nor terrestrial?

As you might guess from all of my questions, this is an immensely frustrating paper — not in its methods, or in the execution of the study, but in the overblown interpretations the authors have been made. It desperately need input from visual neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists, who might have put a damper on the nonsense they’ve shoveled into the work…but then it wouldn’t have made it to CNN, now would it? We could probably sell tickets to a battle of the umbrella hypotheses, Long Range Eyeballs vs. The Aquatic Ape. Epistemic humility just never sells.

(Oh, man, I keep coming back to exceptions they ignore. Aquatic and terrestrial environments are diverse — there are patchy aquatic environments and cluttered terrestrial ones. What about the issue of scale? The jumping spiders on my house live in a savannah-like environment, with wide open areas (the planks of my siding) of long-range visual opportunities, sprinkled with joins that are good hiding places. Why haven’t they invented calculus yet? If you tell me it’s because they’re tiny, then you’ve just admitted that the visual hypothesis is insufficient.)

Is there hope for November?

The Preznit had a rally in Tulsa yesterday — no one is questioning why a sitting president is so insecure he needs these pointless mini-Nuremburgs — and beforehand, his managers were touting the YUGE numbers of people who signed up to attend. Then the rally happened.

In the days leading up to Trump’s Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he and his allies ginned up expectations for a massive crowd with campaign officials telling CNN that more than a million people had registered to attend, and one local official stating they expected 100,000 to show up near the arena.

But those crowds didn’t appear as large as expected Saturday afternoon, leading to an abrupt change of plans by the campaign. A campaign source told CNN that the team was abandoning plans for the President to speak to an “overflow” area outside the arena in Tulsa where only a couple dozen people were standing near the outdoor stage less than two hours before the rally.

The campaign had been leaning toward canceling Trump’s remarks to the overflow crowd for fear of angering the President if there aren’t as many people there as he expected when he lands.

Is there hope? Is his support fading? Maybe. But then there’s this.

He managed to drink a glass of water and is so proud of himself — and the crowd roars! His base might be shrinking, but the ones he has left are zealous morons.

Of course, when I allow myself to consider the possibility he might lose in November, I have to remind myself that his replacement will be Biden.

There ain’t much hope left here.

OK, Mother Iowa, maybe you could tone it down a bit?

This is a Union monument, erected in Iowa after the Civil War.

“IOWA, HER AFFECTIONS, LIKE THE RIVERS OF HER BORDERS, FLOW TO AN INSEPARABLE UNION”

Don’t you dare call it pornographic. It’s a very serious Civil War monument, although it does seem to be lacking in the required plumbing to allow passers-by to be sprayed by her bounty.

Catholic rabbit holes are the creepiest

Did you know that leftists are teaming up with witches to attack America?

Thus, the left has used the occasion to bring together ecologists, socialists, feminists, LGBT activists, pro-abortion advocates, and others to push their false class struggle narratives upon the American public. Less known, however, is the involvement of darker forces. Satanists and witches were invoking evil powers to aid those participating in the violence.

The witches do not hide their involvement in the violent protests. Mashable reports that witches’ covens are actively engaged in hexing police, whom they accuse of brutality. They especially target those who are risking their lives to stop the riots. The witches also cast spells asking for protection for protesters that confront the police. Witch activists used their dark arts as cutting-edge weapons for those who want to engage in a more spiritual class warfare.

The article is right about one thing: secular leftists don’t seem to care. That is correct. Having a contingent on your side that also thinks sending “thoughts and prayers” (and curses and magic spells) is a waste of time and effort, but sure, if it makes you happy, wave your hands in the air, burn a little incense, do some chanting. What’s ironic is who is complaining: Catholics. How can a good conservative Catholic complain about magical thinking?

The author of that article is John Horvat II, who runs a site called The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property. Just the name of the organization has me making the sign of the cross and looking for my holy water (I actually have some somewhere in my office!). But then I discovered their neat list of things they hate, which is a real blast.

The American TFP has opposed:
contraception; abortion; euthanasia; human cloning; the social acceptance of homosexual practice; anti-discrimination laws that give homosexuals a privileged status; the lifting of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in our military; homosexual adoption; domestic partnerships, civil unions, and same-sex “marriage”; transgenderism; homosexual films, theater plays, events, and pro-homosexual clubs on Catholic college campuses; public blasphemy; nudism; socialist childcare; socialist healthcare; socialist allocation of federal waters; death taxes; self-managing socialism; international communism; President Carter’s human rights policy; the policy of détente with communist regimes pursued by the American and Western governments; progressivism; liberation theology; the Vatican’s policy of Ostpolitik with communist governments; the retroactive lifting of statutes of limitations for civil cases involving sexual abuse; the enactment of State laws forcing clergy to violate the seal of Confession in cases of child abuse; the removal of beauty from and the democratization of the Catholic Church; “frenetic intemperance” in the economy; the ecological movement; pacifism; imprudent nuclear disarmament; and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

No wonder they’re unhappy — they’re all a bunch of tightly puckered sphincters. I approve of all of those things! Well, except for removal of beauty. There’s nothing wrong with beauty. But they seem to have an idiosyncratic notion of what beauty means.

In these times of great trials for the Church, it does good to souls to contemplate the sublime beauty of the Church in all its splendor and hierarchy.

Catholic churches have always seemed over-the-top kitschy to me, but this person seems to think rigid order is a synonym for beauty. Then I found the death cult dogma: The Prophet Daniel and the Beauty of Death. Catholicism seems to revel in a kind of gothic creepiness at times.

It is beautiful, because it proclaims that everything in the sensible world is delicate. It exists only with God’s intervention and through no merit of its own. Placed before the specter of death, man senses everything in him that is small and fragile. Death whispers in his ear: “Don’t you realize that everything in life is dust and ashes?” This is good for man, since he is accustomed to seeing his greatness compared to all other perishable things.

There are two other Old Testament phrases that express this same idea: “Vanity of vanities and all is vanity,” (Ecclus. 1:2) and “I have seen all things that are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity, and vexation of spirit.” (Ecclus. 1:14)

This voice ascends above these little perishable things, to teach man that even those things that are seemingly great, are nothing. However, there is Someone, Who hovers above all Creation, Who is a true Marvel. He is God, Our Lord in His Eternity, Inaccessibility, Intangibility and Immutability, Who touches all things without being touched.

In this spirit, the angel proclaims: “Go thou thy ways…and thou shalt rest.” In other words: “You, who were great in the eyes of God and man, you too shall go to your end. You too are perishable and your transitory state shall be broken tonight. The law that all material things must end, applies to you, too. Think of this and you will not be misled to measure Divine things by your puny grandeur.

“You must realize that you are small before the things of God, but also that you have an immortal soul. You have something that is not material, but imperishable. Thus, this end you enter tonight is temporary. In you exists the very principle of life, which is nobler than you and it shall remain.

“Moreover, your soul is good, so you will posses the happiness that things of earth cannot give. You will sleep, but afterwards will come the reconciliation between God and man and eventually your resurrection.”

God is so good that in spite of the perishability of flesh, He will resurrect the body so that it can share in the joys or torments of the soul, according to whether the man was good or bad in this life.

At the end of his announcement, the angel states: “stand in thy lot unto the end of the days.” This is a reference to this General Resurrection. One begins to hear angels sounding the trumpets and coronets that will call all men to judgment. The angel tells Daniel to sleep peacefully and wait for that day, for the death of the just is a dream that awaits the resurrection.

That is why one should always keep death before his eyes and order his life accordingly. Then, when death approaches, he can expect a joyful resurrection on Judgment Day. Living in this perspective will prepare him for the moment when Our Lord will appear with Our Lady at His side, to fulfill, perhaps His greatest promise: “I will be your reward exceedingly great.”

So, man will first be judged immediately at death, when his body is still warm. Aided by Our Lady’s mercy, he will be sentenced according to his love for and union with God, not by his position in the eyes of men. Then he shall see God face-to-face.

All right, that is simply a repulsive set of freakish beliefs. I guess I’m just going to have to summon a demon and cast some unholy imprecations on the Catholic Church. It isn’t beautiful at all.

Hsu resigns his vice presidential appointment

Good news!

Note that, as everyone has been trying to explain to the reactionaries, he was not fired, he still has his professorial appointment, but he no longer has his administrative position. That’s a step forward.

I look forward to Quillette’s tears.