I was momentarily excited. Betelgeuse is dimming! People are speculating that that could mean it’s going to explode in the near future! That would be cool, and I’d love to see a supernova flare up 600 light years away.
Unfortunately, to an astronomer, the “near future” is 100,000 to a million years from now.
Dang it. I guess that means I’ll have to stay alive and wait for it even longer.
I’m free of teaching duties for a few weeks, so my goal for now is to get a paper written summarizing our spider survey results. I’ve been working on figures lately, and here’s a map of our survey sites.
(I also have a boring grayscale map of the same thing, which is probably what I’ll have to use for publication.)
See? We surveyed both sides of the railroad tracks. We should have tried getting more homes in the southeast side of town, though. Not shown are some of our less careful observations of locations outside of garages and sheds, where we’d find many more Araneid spiders. That’s something for another day.
I’ve also been digging deeper into our data — we have all these locations with tallies of all the species present, which is kind of overkill, since the environments we’re looking at are all dominated by just four species, and they’re all coexisting in the same spaces. I’m getting a sense of some of the peculiarities of the distribution, though: I’ve been surprised to see how rare Steatoda triangulosa is around here — we found only one site with that species back in June — and how Steatoda borealis is uncommon as well, but they form these little localized colonies where they are the only Theridiidae present.
Now I’ve got plans for these new angles to pursue, but I have to wait for the world to thaw out and for spiders to rise up again.
I’ve been reading Travis Pangburn’s personal history of the downfall of Pangburn Philosophy, and wow. I had no idea that a saint was living among us. From the outside, what I saw was an impresario who was busy sucking up to the alt-right, who over-committed himself to multiple big ticket events around the world, and then discovered that Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson only have niche appeal and there were only so many tickets for so much that could be sold. He crashed and burned when he couldn’t pay his ‘talent’, when events collapsed, and when he couldn’t even refund ticket-holders money. What I didn’t know, according to Travis, was that none of it was his fault. It was all the result of a conspiracy by his backstabbing employees, and the faithlessness of the people he was paying big money to to perform.
I think Peak Pangburn was reached when his rage at his staff prompted him to send this email to all of them.
Sneaking around, hiding things from me, recording my voice without my knowledge, absurd questioning of my motives and practice, feeling urges of physical violence towards me, citing things from my past work relationships and using that as fuel for your cowardly motives, long conversations on Facebook to plan to confront me on issues in group think, thinking your have admissions of some kind of guilt from me etc etc etc…….. Some of you came to me to report this insanity, but much too late. You had already contributed your drivel to this failure.
You have all disappointed and failed me. (TD’s) email of demands exposed your callousness and/or cowardice. I have no use for cowards. You will never be forgiven, as far as I can tell, for the stress & pressure you put on me and my family the night before my flight to Dublin. You disgust me in your carelessness. My trust for each of you has reached absolute zero.
Effective immediately:
-All of your current contracts with Pangburn Philosophy are terminated. The contract you had me sign under duress at the Vancouver airport is null and void and was never active.
-Your Pangburn email addresses have been deactivated.
-You have no permission to access any Pangburn Philosophy credit cards, PayPal, social media accounts or anything else owned and operated by Travis Pangburn or Pangburn Philosophy.
-The locks, alarm system & surveillance at the Pangburn Philosophy headquarters have all been changed. You are not permitted on the premises, as you are no longer a member of the Pangburn Philosophy team due to your contract termination. If you have personal items left behind, you can schedule a pickup time with me through your personal email.
-You can send me final invoices from your personal email, that are based on your standard operating contract prior to me being put under duress from Masha’s email of collective demands.
-If you have in your possession anything owned by Travis Pangburn or Pangburn Philosophy, make arrangements to return those items swiftly.
A dim light from this precipice:
Each of you has the opportunity, this Friday, July 20th, to call me to attempt to stay on with Pangburn Philosophy in a lesser capacity. If your reasons for calling are outside of your love for the Pangburn Philosophy or myself, don’t waste my time. If your reason for calling is for the love of working with the speakers or artists I pay for, don’t waste my time.
Do not respond to this email in any way. I have no time for your excuses or explanations.
*Any distribution of this email or any other Pangburn Philosophy communication marked confidential will result in fierce legal action. This also includes any contacts that were shared with you confidentially.
I can’t imagine why his staff detested Captain Queeg…I mean, Travis Pangburn. It wasn’t Trav’s fault, it was all their fault, and they deserved to be fired. Unless they’re willing to crawl back and work for less money.
Also amusing: he blames Sam Harris for abandoning him, but at the same time calls him a “great human being”. The obsequious and loquacious tongue-laving, simultaneously sucking up while seething with resentment, reminds me of another character: EB Farnum from the series Deadwood. He’s a bottom-feeder who relies on the patronage of others more popular than he, who lashes out at his underlings whenever he thinks he is unobserved.
Oh, wait, I forgot — he’s a blameless saint.
I learned something from our students. We have these introductory classes for incoming students, and one of them, led by Keith Brugger, was in part about measuring light pollution. So they went out and around Morris, using a meter to measure how dark the skies were in the evening. This is not something I knew anything about, but this week I learned about the Bortle Scale, which I suspect astronomers are already totally familiar with.
I’ve seen the Milky Way vividly outside of town (not in town, unfortunately), so I’d have guessed there are some places nearby that are around a 3 or lower — when we’ve wanted to check out interesting phenomena like the aurora or meteors we go just a few kilometers outside of town for good viewing. This survey produced a map of dark skies for us that suggest some changes.
Morris is roughly at the intersection of Highway 59, which runs north-south, and Highway 28, which runs east-west. I’m used to driving 28, which is the route towards the big cities of eastern Minnesota, so we’ve often scurried out to a spot on 28 east of town to do our skywatching.
According to this map, though, we’d be better off driving south on 59, where it gets even darker. That makes sense — 28 has a small amount of road traffic, and there are itty-bitty farming towns scattered along it, while 59 north leads to Alexandria, has some farms with surprisingly bright lights around the buildings, and also leads to some big wind farms. There’s nothing south on 59. I’ve rarely driven that way, because it’s just empty for a long distance. So now I know where to go during the next meteor shower.
Hey, astronomers, you know this is a good place to live for your ilk! Come on out and stay a while!
Although there is a downside — if you come out with a telescope and go to the darkest regions on the map in the winter months, you’ll also find that it may be -20°C with a wind howling across the open fields.
However, the transmission was garbled. What is that 8-legged abomination on the left, with antennae and three tagma? Such a thing would never manifest itself in my dreams.
My bedtime reading lately has been Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which can partly be blamed for my dreams. It’s a fantasy novel, the usual quest to defeat the evil big bad with a party of a priest, a fighter, a rogue, etc. with one significant twist: they recruit (that is, force) a giant spider to join the team, after magically making it sort of a human/spider hybrid so they can talk to it. It’s entertaining. It’s got spiders in it, so of course it’s fun.
The Bloomberg campaign claims to have discontinued this practice, but they were using prison labor to make campaign calls.
Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.
Sweet! It’s good to be in Minnesota, where we’ll be mostly ignored throughout the campaign season, but it must be reassuring to Iowans to know that some of the election noise they get dunned with is produced by slave labor.
Oh, not quite slavery: the prisoners get paid, sort of.
John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.
When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”
Let’s do the math. $7.25 an hour is $58 per day; if they work them 4 weeks per month, that would be about $1100 dollars per month, which isn’t much of a wage. But the prisons cap their earnings and skim off most of the money. In the worst case of limiting them to $20/month, the prison is making $1080 off their labor. In the best case, where they’re getting paid $27/day, the prison gets about half their earnings.
I wonder if there is some kind of profit motive driving mass incarceration in the United States? Nah, couldn’t be. That would be evil. This Republican, for instance, wouldn’t be evil, would he?
I checked on my colony this morning — no news to report. However, Trillian was just being herself, hanging out all relaxed in her web, legs spread out, and so I had to snap a picture.
Spiders do have personalities. Trillian is a casual exhibitionist, happy to sprawl out in her web, while, for instance, Mary Jane is shy and timid, tending to huddle in a corner. Trillian wins on photogenicity, that’s for sure.
Steatoda triangulosa
What Christmas Eve? My wife and I are two old people abandoned by their children. Alaric has a movie date for Christmas, so he’s not going to visit. Connlann is in far-off Texas with Ji and their toddler, Knut; he can’t get away. Skatje is in Boulder, Colorado with Kyle and Iliana, and they’re not coming, either. This is the fate of all parents, that their kids grow up and move away and no longer have time for them. It doesn’t help that in my childhood, the big extended family all lived near the grandparents, and we were used to gigantic noisy family get-togethers over the holidays. My kids have all dispersed to distant places, and frigid isolated Morris is not exactly an attractive vacation spot.
That reminds me — I better call my mother. If you’ve got ’em, you should call any beloved relatives, too.
(It’s OK, they shouldn’t feel guilty. We’re proud to have independent, self-sufficient children.)
No? A nebbish in glasses and a suit, especially a white nebbish, doesn’t fit your picture of a terrorist? Adjust your search image. That’s Matt Shea, an elected Republican representative from Washington state whose activities have been investigated in a report with this alarming conclusion.
Based on evidence obtained in this investigation, it is more probable than not that Representative Shea is likely to plan, direct and engage in additional future conflicts that could carry with them significant risk of bloodshed and loss of life. It is the professional opinion of the Investigators, that on a more probable than not basis, Representative Shea presents a present and growing threat of risk to others through political violence.
That conclusion was reached not by criticizing his badthink, but by looking at what he has actually done. We’re talking about more than just openly despising the federal government (I’m guilty of that one), but also actively conspiring with violent organizations, such as various militia groups.
He also used his position in the government to obtain and leak information about police responses to those terrorists to the terrorists. He’s also a Christian theocrat, of course: “Representative Shea unveiled the Biblical Basis for War that offered his view of God’s authorization for war. [At] the same meeting Representative Shea distributed the Restoration document which was his blueprint for rebuilding after the fall of the US Government.” The Biblical_Basis_for_War is, naturally, abortion, homosexuals, and those goddamned Commies.
The Seattle Times is calling for his expulsion from the legislature. I’m sure that will persuade his constituents in Spokane. For those not familiar with Washington state politics, the west side of the state, and especially Seattle, is the relatively wealthy, democratic, populous and urban side, while Spokane and the eastern side in general are rural, sparsely populated, agricultural, and very conservative; for sure, there are knees jerking hard in sagebrush country, and a recommendation from the Seattle Times will be reflexively opposed. Coincidentally, Shea also sponsors the idea of splitting the state in two, with a new state called Liberty formed from the most impoverished region in the state, but where Christian Dominionism could flourish.
One note of hope, though, is that it is Republican officials from the eastern side of the state who are begging that he be stripped of power. I guess there are limits to what kind of violent lunacy even Republicans will accept.
For the rest of us, absorb this important lesson. That bland doughboy at the top of this page is the real face of domestic terrorism.
JK Rowling is now enrolled in the League of Disappointing Authors. Their clubhouse has to be like a Tardis or something to accommodate all of the membership.
I don’t even want to imagine the after-dinner conversation, once they’ve had a little wine and loosened up and find themselves in like-minded company.
