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.

New cage is a success so far

You may be pleased to hear that my initial test of my new spider cage architecture didn’t kill my test subject, and she actually looks a little more lively and relaxed this morning. She has started filling in a web and was hangin’ upside down and chillin’ like a boss — now that she has a bit of a cobweb, I’ll toss some flies in this morning and see how she reacts.

Then this weekend I’ll have to assemble another dozen or so frames. It takes about 5 minutes to cut sticks to size and tack ’em together with hot glue, so that won’t be too time-consuming.

“Silent Sam”? I think you mean “Shady Sam”

An interesting development in the Silent Sam saga. Silent Sam was a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina that was toppled by protesters, which prompted the university to immediately and generously hand over $2½ million to a sleazy racist organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans to lovingly care for the beloved statue of a racist traitor. It was weird. The SCV had scarcely declared their intent to sue when the university immediately handed over millions of dollars to this shakedown by a low-rent gang of nobodies.

Well, never mind. A judge just voided the whole arrangement.

A judge has overturned a contentious settlement that the University of North Carolina system reached with the Sons of Confederate Veterans over the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam.

The November 2019 agreement required the UNC system to give Silent Sam to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, along with $2.5 million for its preservation and display. It was announced within minutes of a lawsuit filed by the group.

There’s something going on at that university, and it’s not to be trusted. The board of governors apparently has so much power, and certain biases, that they can just cavalierly fling huge sums of money at a mob of Confederate rats who just ask for it.

After the statue came down, it was put into storage. The university system’s board of governors gave no indication about what they planned to do with the monument before a sudden announcement that the system had reached a deal with the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

As NPR reported in December, “The university system insisted it was settling a lawsuit, but court records show the board of governors’ chairman agreed to the deal before a lawsuit existed.” Baddour signed off on the deal just seven minutes after the lawsuit was filed.

The UNC system’s Board of Governors never held a public meeting to discuss options for what to do with the statue.

UNC is a state and federally funded institution that needs to have its money management policies closely scrutinized. No matter what side of this decision you favor, there is something seriously wrong with how the board decides to spend money.