I get a bit of grief about showing spider photos, but have you ever seen closeups of insects? Sheesh. Hairy angular beasties with intricate mouthparts and creepy genitalia jutting out. I don’t know how anyone can stand to look at them.
Anyway, take a look at the gallery and shudder. You can reassure yourself that good, sweet, adorable spiders will eat them all.
I just read J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues (does she always refer to herself in the third person?). It was gobsmackingly oblivious and stupid. My opinion of Rowling’s intelligence and writing ability has just been blown to bits. It just goes on and on, alternating between self-pity and denial and bad science. I’m not going to quote from it, with the exception of one sentence that is absolutely bonkers.
Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.
So, because they reject the identities of trans men, they aren’t really exclusionary? Trans men are OK because they’re actually women? That was so totally a TERFY statement.
That settles it. The grandkids are not ever going to get any Harry Potter books from me.
I’ve been laid up for almost a week with a bad knee (very bad knee! It shall be punished!), so I’ve been doubly-confined by the stupid virus and the stupid knee. Today I’m feeling well enough to trek across the street and get some work done — boring work. I have to shuffle microscopes and balances around to get them ready for a maintenance visit. But! I also get to check in and feed the spiders, who were left last week with possible mates, and set up some new spiders recently caught, and check on some wild spiders around the science building. It will be a better day than usual, I hope.
I also have big plans for some more elaborate spidering expeditions next week, so I’m going to be careful of this obnoxious knee now, so that it will be even stronger then.
Further goodness: I’m expecting a present for myself from myself in the mail today. I’ll show you later.
I’d never heard of Surgisphere before. Apparently, no one had. They just suddenly appeared out of nowhere with vast amounts of data from numerous hospitals, a gigantic database that they’d used to address the question of the utility of hydroxychoroquine in treating COVID-19, and came back with the expected answer: no, it’s not any good. They got quoted all over the place! Great PR! Suddenly, lots of people had heard of Surgisphere.
Unfortunately, Surgisphere is a crock.
The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.
A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.
Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.
Hey! Nothing wrong with citizen input from science fiction writers and adult-content models. There had better be more substance behind the claims, though. It turns out that there is confusion about how many employees the company has (100? 6? 3?) depending on the source, there don’t seem to be any people with the special skills need for the study — this is Big Data stuff, lots of statistics and computer science — and the data has been falling apart. The study claimed to be derived from “96,000 patients with Covid-19, admitted to 671 hospitals from their database of 1,200 hospitals around the world”, but various hospitals have reported that the data doesn’t match what they’ve reported.
And then, the big question: how did this company get access to so much confidential medical information?
One of the questions that has most baffled the scientific community is how Surgisphere, established by Desai in 2008 as a medical education company that published textbooks, became the owner of a powerful international database. That database, despite only being announced by Surgisphere recently, boasts access to data from 96,000 patients in 1,200 hospitals around the world.
When contacted by the Guardian, Desai said his company employed just 11 people [nobody seems to know how many people work there]. The employees listed on LinkedIn were recorded on the site as having joined Surgisphere only two months ago. Several did not appear to have a scientific or statistical background, but mention expertise in strategy, copywriting, leadership and acquisition.
What is clear is that there was a massive falsification of data. It also looks like the chief executive of the company, Sapan Desai, is a con artist with a history of pseudoscientific schemes.
What’s interesting about the story, though, is that it demonstrates how everyone is a bit gullible, and is willing to suspend skepticism a bit when the science, pseudo or otherwise, seems to support prior expectations. Lots of people got fooled by this one. Researchers even suspended ongoing trials because they thought Surgisphere had just provided the definitive answer! At first, it was only the hydroxychloroquine fanatics who were skeptical of the study, and embarrassingly, they were right, in this one case. But the real difference is that the real scientists, like David Gorski, will reassess their conclusions in the light of new information, admit to their error, and move on.
That’s the difference between the cultists and me. I’ll change my mind if they present new information that checks out when I dig into it. It’s also a lesson that a believer’s skepticism when examining something he disagrees with will always be far more rigorous than when looking at a study that goes against what he currently believes. Think of it as a somewhat embarrassing reminder to myself (coupled, perhaps, with a bit of self-flagellation) to remain humble in the future and not to be too fast to dismiss criticisms coming from even the cultists.
Surgisphere’s papers are getting trashed. The legitimate hydroxychloroquine studies have resumed — way too many studies than the treatment deserves, if you ask me. If they come back with positive information about the value of the drug (I don’t think they will, since the claims all originated from sources as quacky as Sapan Desai) then I’ll accept new treatment recommendations. The question is, will the drug’s proponents accept any evidence from any studies that show its efficacy is baseless?
Emergency surgery: the patient, a handsome Mozambique tilapia in the prime of life, was trapped inside a maze of tunnels, an environment not compatible with life. Medical scans revealed its location, but it was deep and too large to be easily extracted.
The only solution was to go in and widen the tunnels. When they finally got to the fish, though, it was too late. It had expired.
It may have been dead for a while, and its location was not exactly conducive to preservation.
To make matters even more disgusting (if that’s possible), medics were reportedly gagging at the smell in the operating theatre.
Tragic and horrifying. O Poor Tilapia! We grieve for you.
The question remains: how did this terrible event happen to the fish?
When a nurse questioned him on it, the patient claimed he’d ‘accidentally sat on’ the fish, which then entered his body via his anus.
Seems legit.
A chat transript has circulated on China’s social media service Weibo. It states that the healthcare worker responded, saying: “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
People, look before you sit down. You never know when a fish might be sitting in your chair. From the perspective of any innocent small animal taking a break on your office chair, you’re just an ominous stinky dark hole lowering itself to engulf anything on the seat.
I’ll be on this show in about a half hour. Tune in!
It’s almost 5 minutes of distilled police behavior.
I would have been reluctant to say it a few months ago, but jeez, I hate cops.
Although they do run an effective PR campaign, if their goal was to alienate everyone in the US.
I’m reading Tea Francis’s story, and wow, that’s me, except I waited until I was 60 to get into spiders. I wasted so much time! (Well, not really, I do have a family and a career, so I can’t complain about that.)
I have kept spiders for almost 20 years now, sometimes just one tarantula, sometimes lots of different types of spiders, but they’ve been present in some capacity ever since I was 17 or 18. After moving somewhere with more space at the beginning of last year, my collection had expanded significantly to almost 200 spiders of all different types. I decided to start an Instagram account to post about my spiders as whenever I posted anything to do with them anywhere else, I got a load of the usual ‘kill it with fire’ responses which I find grating, to say the least. I started to focus my attention on studying them a lot more closely. I invested in my very first DSLR and macro lens and set about learning how to use it. That in itself unlocked a whole new level of appreciation for them and I quickly became hopelessly, irretrievably obsessed. With new photos popping up on my Instagram feed every day, sometimes multiple times a day, they seemed to be gaining rather a lot of interest from other enthusiasts, photographers, keepers and even arachnophobes who were consciously working on overcoming their fears. This was a bit of a revelation for me & definitely a motivation to do more! I took it to Twitter as well and began posting there too, where I ended up meeting a lot of arachnology folk who were either studying towards or already active in the field I had always quietly dreamed of being involved in myself. Actually working with and researching spiders.
Then look at her lovely spider nook! It’s like fantasy land!
I’m not too jealous, though. I look at that and see a heck of a lot of maintenance work, and also sadness — most spiders aren’t that long-lived, so there’s always death among the beloved horde. Also, this would be a terrifying time to be at the start of a science career. Stay strong, Ms Francis!
King Leopold II meets an appropriate fate.
Splashed with red paint and burned. He never looked better.
I doubt that George Floyd ever imagined that he would be involved in changing the world.
