More eerie cave creatures!

Um Ladaw Cave in India is a chamber 300 feet below the surface that fills to the brim with water in the rainy season, and is only accessible in the winter dry season…well, “accessible” is a relative term. This is how you get there.

Once you make the descent, there are pools of water filled with a large population of pale, blind cave fish. These are big fish, too. They are probably fed by the constant trickle of organic material flowing down from the surface. Deep caves are also a nesting place for bats that poop into the water, which just tells you that some animals can eat anything.

That kind of diet must leave them desperate — in the video, you can see them trying to gnaw on the camera lens. Anything is fair game.

The existence of this pattern of pigment and eye loss in multiple species around the world tells you that something as complex as vision requires constant maintenance via natural selection, though. It’s remarkably consistent that animal species living in the total darkness of deep caves tend to all become pallid and blind over time.

Ugh. Maher.

Bill Maher soft-pedaled Mike Bloomberg’s racism last night. You know, this Bloomberg, who bragged about targeting minorities for selective policing.

Maher was addressing the tape of Bloomberg from 2015 that re-emerged this week, wherein the former mayor of New York City admitted—to a crowd of rich, white folks in Aspen—that his stop-and-frisk policy, which was unconstitutional, led to thousands of dubious marijuana arrests, and ruined many lives, was about targeting “minorities.”

“Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25…That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed,” said Bloomberg.

He continued: “People say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities!’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why’d we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids’ hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them.”

Bloomberg is terrible. He’s the worst choice among the Democrats, and I say that as someone who detests Biden. I’m still going to vote Democrat if Biden is the nominee, but if it’s Bloomberg…I might not. Allowing Bloomberg to buy his way into the presidency is the end of the party and democracy in general in the US. It means we’re a total plutocracy, and that our representatives have willingly sold out. Besides, Bloomberg is a stone cold racist piece of shit.

Maher joked about that, and got booed.

“Bernie Sanders won Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also leading in the national polls, which means we have a new frontrunner… Michael Bloomberg? What the fuck?” offered Maher, adding, “Well, Bloomberg must be the frontrunner because liberals are calling him a racist.”

When the audience began booing Maher’s joke castigating liberals for calling Bloomberg a racist, he sniped, “Keep booing—that’s how you lost the last election.”

He’s not the frontrunner, no matter how much the media and rich phonies like Maher get starry-eyed over him, and liberals are calling him racist because he said racist things. Why is Maher glossing over the blatant, outrageous things a rich man with power said? Those remarks are not a minor issue.

What’s interesting, though, is that Maher has lost his audience. Part of that is almost certainly that revealing accusation: “you lost the election.” Maher does not identify with his audience, and does not identify with those of us who are suffering with the election of Donald Trump. Maher’s got his, he’s feeling no pain, and his audience of centrist liberals can go fuck themselves.

Why does Maher still have a show? Why do you (that’s right, I don’t identify with people who watch him) continue to watch his crappy program and his smug face? When will he find himself unemployed, so he can more righteously complain about his cancellation?

Behold! The official Myers Lab Spider-Cam!

Remember how I complained about my defunct microscope camera? I complain no more. Thanks to a gift from an exceedingly generous donor, I now have a brand new beautiful Canon camera for the lab! Here it is, mounted on a microscope adapter on my Wild M3C; I can also mount it on my Leica.

So glorious. It’s going to see a lot of use, too. I share this scope with my colleagues in the department, and they can also use it to photograph their non-spider specimens. Most kindly, it also came with a collection of lenses, which means I can use it for more than just lab work — I’m trying to get funding for a summer student to do a spider diversity survey, and this means we’ll both be going out around West Central Minnesota, documenting spiders all over the place.

This is going to make my work so much easier. Next, I’m going to have to get some really tiny things I can photograph on the new setup — in the next week or so, I’ll post some samples.

It was like Christmas around here this afternoon! An entirely secular, scientific Christmas, of course.

I ♥ my hot glue gun & Dremel

It’s a busy day with all these job interview related things, but over my lunch hour I banged out 8 more spider cages, even with my gimpy left arm. I used a saw attachment on my Dremel (sorry, neighbors, if there was a lot of high-pitched screaming noises from my lab) to quickly hack up some bamboo strips and quarter-inch dowels, and then slapped them all together with hot glue. So easy.

I’m letting them cool now, and then I have to go through and clear out the threads of hardened glue scattered around — although the spiders probably won’t mind the strings — and let any fumes air out for a day, and then fill them up with more spiders.

And clean up. My lab is full of sawdust and little scraps of wood right now.

In the End Times, idiots can promise anything

I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible somewhere, but I haven’t cracked one of those open in decades.

Anyway, Jim Bakker, convicted fraud, rapist, and shill for bulk food products, is now capitalizing on fear of the coronavirus to sell a “cure”, bringing on a naturopath to tout the virtues of colloidal silver.

You know it doesn’t work, right? Bakker is selling quantities ranging in price from $40 to $300 to gullible old Christians who tremble in fear at every paranoid theory Fox News trots out.

…similarly marketed products also include colloidal silver which according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) provides no known health benefits. Ingesting it can cause side effects including argyria, or discoloration of the skin or other tissue, and poor absorption of other medications by the body.

Whoa. When the NCCIH, an organization of quacks designed to funnel federal grant money to other quacks, says this snake oil has no health benefits at all, then you know it’s bad. Of course, knowing NCCIH, they’re probably only saying that because colloidal silver isn’t part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they’d rather you got acupuncture to cure your viral disease.

Funny, I don’t remember banging my elbow into anything

Yesterday, I discovered that my elbow was causing me excruciating pain. I was mystified; I wasn’t doing any unusual physical activity the day before, and I don’t remember bumping into anything with my elbow. I have no idea what happened.

Except, now that I have a flaming hot lance of incredible fiery pain in my elbow, I’ve discovered that I bang into things all the time. Walk into the bedroom, there’s a door…of course I hit it with my elbow. Go to the bathroom…whoops, there’s a divider by the sink, give it a good whack. Is it possible for me to make coffee in the morning without bumping into anything? No, it is not. Now I go around hissing in agony and cussing up a storm.

At least I have learned the evolutionary function of elbows. They are knobby bony things that act as antennae to detect obstacles in the environment for clumsy people. No other purpose. Also, they have a direct neural connection to the expletive lobule of the brain.

They really, really, really want to use racist slurs

Dennis Prager is upset that he “isn’t allowed” to use the n-word.

He’s wrong, though. There is no n-word police, anyone can use the term any time they want, there isn’t a gang of leftists waiting to kneecap you for saying those two syllables. Go ahead, say it, Dennis!

The only consequence is that it confirms you’re a racist. But then, wanting to say it is sufficient to affirm that, so mission accomplished, Dennis Prager.

Anyway, it’s just the strangest thing to desire.