Oh, this is sad. Gahan Wilson hasn’t produced much new in recent years — he has been suffering from dementia — but I discovered his work in the 70s and loved it. He and Gary Larson plucked my brain out and shaped it before stuffing it back in my cranium.
“I won’t bring any more friends home unless you let me play with them first!”
His work was always distinctive and recognizable, and unlike anyone else’s. That’s a great legacy.
Winter is a tough time to be an arachnophile, especially in the Great White North. It’s even tougher to be a spider. They’re mostly gone from outdoors — I’ve been looking, and everything is frozen and windy, the bugs are all dead, and it’s no place for an arachnid.
They do have some places to thrive, though: in your house. We people at least provide refugia for a few species, like the theridiidids I’ve been following. My wife, who has the eyes of an eagle, found this tiny little guy in our kitchen and scooped him up. He’s a juvenile so it’s hard to tell, but the palps look swollen and he’ll probably be ready to mate after his next molt.
The photo isn’t the best. A) he’s very smol, b) I’m shooting through plastic, c) he’s dangling on a single slender thread spanning the tube, and is practically vibrating, and d) he’s very excited because I fed him a fly, and he’s fangs-deep in that juicy fresh beast.
He’s Parasteatoda, and has a spectacularly stark pattern of angular pigments on his abdomen (not adequately shown). Once he has settled down and is nestled in a comfortable web — it takes a few days for them to build a cozy nest — I’ll have to get some better shots.
At least when people ask where spiders go in the winter, I have an answer. They go to my house.
The first 3 points are nice but not personally relevant, it’s the last two that are most important too me.
Let’s accept all 5!
Well, I, for one, do have tenure, and am free to pursue my goal of building an army of multi-legged venomous monsters and taking over the planet from my secret lair in an exotic location that no one would ever dream could be the center of an empire.
Livin’ the dream! Bwahahahahahahahaha!
Now I just have to solve the minor problem that my experimental subjects are so tiny.
The bad news: in the future, rich people are dreaming of driving around in fugly brutalist armored trucks from Tesla, lording it over the masses in their slabs of cold gray metal.
The good news: they are easily cracked open to reach the soft, pampered sweet-meats inside.
The @Tesla #Cybertruck 'Armor Glass' demo didn't go exactly as plannedpic.twitter.com/gl88Yhs35b
— Engadget (@engadget) November 22, 2019
Bad demo, Elon, bad. That’s not going to light up the eyes of the wealthy people who can afford to buy your dystopian style.
Although, to be fair, the 500 mile range is a very appealing feature. Our standard long drive is about 150 miles to the Twin Cities, and most electric cars would get us there, but not back.
I’ve got to say, Irina Dumitrescu has the most cynical view of the university system I’ve read. I don’t entirely agree, but I can see where she’s coming from.
Universities sing the song of meritocracy but dance to a different tune. In reality, they will do everything to reward and protect their most destructive, abusive and uncooperative faculty. The more thoroughly such scholars poison departments, programmes and individual lives, the more universities double down to please them.
Universities are even willing to ruin their own reputations and alienate their alumni to protect bullies and abusers. They might think that reputation management demands that such behaviour be swept under the carpet, but they ought to know that the scandals will break eventually, and that the cover-up will make them look worse. Some universities even hire people in the full knowledge of abuse allegations against them, thereby becoming invested in keeping secret their decision to put their students in harm’s way.
On the whole, I’ve found universities to be broadly egalitarian and altruistic, but that the management tends to be more out of touch with our ideals. There’s a body of people at the top who see the educational system as a political tool to get power and influence, and we’re at their mercy.
That said, though, it’s also the case that a population dedicated to teaching and science is acutely vulnerable to individuals who can cut through our ranks like a hot needle through butter. I’ve known people who fit her formula for success…even though they are the minority, I imagine her formula for penetrating academia would work too well.
- Cultivate powerful friends. Gain power over as many publication organs and scholarly bodies as possible and use them to promote your clique.
- Do nothing for anyone unimportant.
- Find a less successful scholar who will fear and admire you. Flatter them into becoming your sidekick and count on them to denigrate your colleagues and defend your reputation.
- Crush the confidence of students with the potential to surpass you. Or sleep with them. Or both.
- Manipulate students and employees into feeling they owe you, long after you no longer have power over them. Make outrageous, unethical promises they will feel bad about accepting or refusing.
- Promote a zero-sum model of success. Anyone else’s gain is your loss. Claim your students’ work as your own and reassign their best ideas to your favourites. Collaboration is for losers.
- Systematically badmouth your colleagues so you can improve your own standing. Shut out the students of rival scholars. Mock those rivals for having less successful students.
- Gaslight and spread misinformation about anyone who stands up to you. Complain about the “rumour mill” and “witch-hunts”. Accuse your critics of jealousy.
- Ask loudly why no one is willing to come forward officially to substantiate the rumours of abuse against you. If someone overcomes their terror, call them crazy.
- Lie brazenly. Accuse others of lying.
Dang. I’ve been doing it all wrong. I think my academic mentors have been setting a bad example for this kind of behavior.
It’s strange, too, that we would attract these kinds of individuals at all. It’s not like we’re competing for huge rewards — this is actually not at all how academia works, sadly.
Maybe not “sadly”…while it would have been nice to buy my mama a house with my first academic appointment, I think it would be terrible to have such an over-inflated sense of worth, and it would have also led to attracting even more toxic personalities.
I’m buried in paperwork today and have scarcely had time to do anything with the spider colony today, but I did make my usual scan through the adult cages for new egg sacs (nothing today — they’re still all lurking, full of insect goo), and looked through the juveniles to see who I needed to promote to a larger container. Here’s one with a beautiful complex pattern of mottling on her abdomen, so I grabbed a photo just prior to moving. She’s not appreciative of being shuttled around and disturbed, so she’s in her standard “leave me alone” pose.
That’s Parasteatoda, by the way. Beautiful plumage! Lovely plumage! She’s just restin’, really she is.
A business professor, Eric Rasmusen, tweeted something offensive and stupid.
Eric Rasmusen tweeted a line from an article Nov. 7 titled “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably,” which read, “Geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low agreeableness and moderately low conscientiousness.”
He can do that. Employment is not contingent on holding only good opinions and not being an asshole, so he’s not threatened with firing for it, although some people would like to. The university administration has made arrangements so students can avoid taking classes with him, which could eventually lead to trouble for him — if he has non-existent effectiveness as a teacher, that could end up as a dismissal. Not being able to do the job you’re hired for is grounds for being let go, and a conservative business professor ought to encourage that.
What annoys me, though, is his dishonest excuse. I don’t believe this at all:
Rasmusen has taught business economics and public policy in the Kelley School of Business since 1992. He said he shared the tweet because a quote in the article stood out to him.
“I don’t know the contents of the article,” Rasmusen said. “It was just the one part that I thought was interesting and worth keeping note of.”
Rasmusen said he was surprised his tweet received backlash.
“It seems strange to me because I didn’t say anything myself — I just quoted something,” he said.
Oh, he was just quoting someone else. He wasn’t expressing odious, ignorant ideas, he was just echoing an odious, ignorant idea, which makes it OK, because it means he has a handy scapegoat.
Except…
“To show students that they need not fear bias in grading, the university is condemning a dissident professor, requiring him to use blind grading, and allowing students to opt out of his class,” he said in the email. “This, it is claimed, will make students relaxed and feel able to express their political views without fear of retribution. Having seen the university crack down on the one outspoken conservative professor, students will feel more comfortable in expressing their views while at Indiana University — that is, they will know what to expect if they speak freely in the classes of the 999 liberal professors. Of course, IU is not discouraging bias, but encouraging it, even requiring it, as a condition of teaching. There are views you’re not supposed to express, even outside of class, and heaven help the student whose professor checks his twitter account before issuing grades.”
You don’t get to simultaneously claim that you are a dissident conservative martyr and that what you said was not your opinion and therefore innocuous. That’s not how any of this works.
Add to that fact that his other tweets and his blog apparently show that he really does believe women are inferior and should be subservient, and I don’t think that flashing the “quote” card is as effective a shield as he believes.
Hey! I forgot to mention! You know, that Anti-Theism International Convention that is handing out the most prestigious Awards in the Atheist Community
is also having an auction.
If you attend, you can bid on a beautiful painting of Christopher Hitchens.
Not the photo to the right. A painting kind of like that that doesn’t exist. Yet.
They are now taking offers to paint it. Don’t worry, they’ll pay you! The offer even includes free admission to the conference.
I guess they’re appealing to the kinds of people who want a fancy painting, any painting, of Christopher Hitchens on their wall, and they think advertising the potential existence of such an object will be a draw for their event.
It’s two things I really detest: atheist idolatry and selling vapor. We might as well be Catholics.
Now for something totally different. I’m gearing up for a project in which I track the developmental progression of pigmentation in juvenile spiders, and along the way, also map out variation in that pigment. Analyzing all that will require a fair amount of data; I’ll have to do a daily collection of pigmentation images for a single cohort of spiders, and organize those for analysis. I have a poor idea of how much time that will take, so I did a speedrun this morning. I lined up 6 containers of juvenile spiders (all S. triangulosa from the same clutch, plus one S. borealis of roughly the same age), and racked them up for fast photography. I gave myself 30 seconds per spider to get a photo series, which turned out to be easily done, the fastest part of the whole process.
Then I took all the images and made a focus stack, which took a while but since it was all automated was fairly painless. Then I rotated all the images to the same orientation, anterior upwards. First glitch: some of the spiders were annoying and presented a side view to me, rather than the dorsal view I wanted. I went with it anyways; the only way to get them to oblige is to catch them in repose in the appropriate position, so that’s going to take a couple of trials to get right. Next, everything was scaled to the same size.
Data collection: a few minutes. Processing the images: over an hour. I think I’ll be able to automate some of the processing, though, which ought to simplify and speed it up. The end result is a series of standardized images of 6 spiders in which I can see the dorsal pigmentation fairly well, although two of them were not compliant about lying in an optimal position.
