I only find out now about this?

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and no one ever told me about the Pacific folding trap-door spider. I sure never saw one. But this lucky woman out walking her dog saw one on the sidewalk and — oh what a waste — ran away.

Experts say the spider she spotted is a Pacific folding trap-door spider. It’s not a tarantula, but it is a “tarantuloid” – a related type of arachnid – according to Jaymie Chudiak, general manager of the Victoria Bug Zoo.

“It is the closest thing we have to a tarantula,” Chudiak said. “They are incredibly beautiful, but also very large, so people who do see them go, ‘Oh my gosh, what is that? It’s enormous.’ But they’re actually extremely docile and timid.”

If you want, there’s a picture at the link. It’s beautiful.

I also learned this.

Like tarantulas, there is a commercial market that sells Folding Trapdoor Spiders. Many species in this genus are brown or dark brown. The black, native Pacific Folding Door Trapdoor Spider is commonly sold in the Pacific Northwest as a pet.

“Commonly”? “Commonly”? It is true. I wasted my youth, because I never saw one. Now I want to.

OMG! I’m caught up in one class!

Finally, I’ve waded through the entire backlog of grading for my genetics class, and have sent every student a personal email stating where they currently stand, what assignments are missing (I’m offering amnesty on all the homework), and what they can do to improve their grade this week — lab reports, for instance, can be revised to correct errors. There is still a gigantic take-home final looming ahead, which constitutes about a quarter of their total grade, and I’ve warned them about that. That does mean that this is only the lull before the storm, though, but at least I’ve got a couple of days to work on bailing out my lifeboat. I expect to be swamped by the end of this week and early next week, again.

It also means my class content for this last week is taken care of. I get to deal with students’ concerns about their grades, and also review the entire semester to prepare them for the final.

Now to celebrate this fleeting triumph by…uh, I dunno. What do we do to party anymore? I know, maybe get started on wrapping up my second class.

I knew all along that Lio was a good kid

Of course, the first comment on the comic is this BS:

Nobody gets to be a billionaire without creating something that millions, even billions, of people want and pay for. If you don’t like billionaires, then trying living your life without everything they’ve made possible for you.

Reassuringly, that commenter will never be a billionaire, because he fundamentally misunderstands how one becomes a billionaire. It’s not by creating something, but by figuring out how to profit off the labor of others.

IMPORTANT: do not learn anatomy from reddit or twitter

Or from men, apparently.

Men can’t possibly commit sexual assault, because there’s no way they’d be able to find their way about in a woman’s nethers. They’ll just fumble about and end up poking her in a dimple in her knee, or something.

Or they’re just grossed out by the arrangement of parts.

I think we all want that guy to continue to be repulsed by all women. It’s best for everyone.

Property values in Alex Jones’ neighborhood must be plummeting

He is a scary, sick man. He fantasizes about chopping up his neighbors and feeding them to his daughters. Where is CPS?

Speaking of values plummeting, Elon Musk murdered the price of his stock with a tweet. One tweet about the price of his stock being too high, and investors promptly wiped out $14 billion of his company’s worth (and $3 billion off his personal worth). That ought to make you wonder: if tweeting 6 words demolishes all that money in a day, doesn’t that tell you that stock prices are mostly a shared fiction? If I had any personal investments in the stock market, I’d want to bail out fast and invest in something real…like, maybe, tulips.

We should also wonder about something else. All these famous “influencers” — Jones, Musk, Jordan Peterson, probably many others — are exposed as flawed, fragile people who seem to have been broken by fortune and fame to the point where any little thing seems able to tip them over into a slide towards self-destruction. It’s a long slide, too, where they continue to be newsworthy even as they expose themselves to be merely human and far too damaged to be authorities or leaders in much of anything.

Hoo boy, the Discovery Institute is pathetic

Everyone seems to be “pivoting to video”, including the creationists, so I might as well join in the fun. The Discovery Institute put out a quasi-animated video with a young hipster narrator to promote science denialism — they want to claim that the whale transitional series is bogus, and that all those fossils are just a random jumble of unconnected species that somehow just appeared, and none of them are really intermediates. So I had to expose the flaws in their thinking. Unstylishly, of course.

If I look a little bit squinky-eyed, it’s because I only noticed after recording it that the sun was glaring in through the window to one side. Next time I do one of these, I’d better draw the blinds.